I think I have an addiction. It is called Barnegat Light. This gem of a place has brought me five excellent trips since my first time going there in November. We had two goals this trip: find Piping Plovers and give my friend, Teri, the Barnegat experience. This trip was suppose to happen last weekend, but the weather did not cooperate and the east coast had heavy rains. This weekend, however, it was warm and the sun was shining.
We were greeted by one of the most beautiful waterfowl – the Long-tailed Duck. They were beginning to enter into breeding plumage, something that I have not seen yet.
Another first for me were Laughing Gulls in breeding plumage. I’ve only ever seen them in the fall. They stayed away from the jetty.
Bird-wise, it started out very quiet. The jetty looked empty and we could not see birds in the water. This could have been due to the very high winds which caused massive waves in the inlet.
We left the jetty and went onto the beach to look for Piping Plovers along the fenced off breeding grounds. Still nothing. We finally spotted two birds.
American Oystercatchers! It seemed like they didn’t want to move, so we made our way closer to them and dropped as low as we could go for some photos. After reviewing the photos on the computer, I noticed something special – the blowing sand was visible in our photos. The three of us had no idea we captured this!
After this treat, the birds came moving in. A large flock of shorebirds zipped past and landed on the jetty.
We made our way back up on the rocks and snapped away at Dunlin, Purple Sandpipers and Sanderlings. These birds gave us some great photo ops!
That is when we started to see an over-whelming numbers of birds. Adult male Surf Scoters, Loons, Cormorants, Long-tailed Ducks in breeding plumage – it was difficult to concentrate on one bird.
And then we spotted Barnegat’s staple wintering bird, the Harlequin Duck.
The males were getting very feisty now that it is closer to breeding season.
They were trying to attract this beautiful girl.
We made our way back up the jetty, chasing more Harlequins and looking for new birds. A young Cormorant followed us, but every time we would point our cameras at him, he would dive.
I did manage to get a nice photo of him though.
We ran into our shorebird flock multiple times. They would stay perched until the waves hit the rocks hard.
The waves were just getting worse as we made our way to the end. I stopped a bit early, anticipating wet rocks (and wet camera?) and my friends started their way further up.
They changed their minds too and headed back toward me. We could see many birds in the distance – Northern Gannets, many Scoters, tons of Long-tailed Ducks, possible Eiders… too bad we could not get close enough!
We headed back up the jetty, once again, chasing the Harlequins for photos of them on the rocks. I never did get that op this time by, but still got nice photos of them.
We saw other good birds on the way back toward the lighthouse.
We then went back onto the beach to look for the Piping Plovers. Unfortunately, it was probably a bit too windy for them and we did not see any. Now that I see the moving sand in some of my photos, I know why a small bird would want to stay away.
On our way back up the beach, we ran into four very cooperative Brant and I got my best photos of them. It was nice getting down at eye level rather than shooting them from above on the jetty!
Even though we dipped on the Plover, it was still a great day of birding. We were able to achieve the most important goal of the trip – introduce a new person to Barnegat and, in the process, get her hooked to it!