Thursday, August 23, 2007

A foggy start to the day.

Now that the rain has finally broken, for the most part, I figured I'd get out before work to look for a few of these migrants which are being reported and I'm having no luck relocating.

While it was a foggy start to the morning, things were burning off at a good rate. We didn't have a huge amount of time for birding this morning so we decided for a quick jaunt around the Cape May Point State Park. Try as we might, we were unsuccessful at getting any glimpses of the previously seen Buff-breasted or Baird's sandpipers.

Not that it was particularly good conditions for migration, there were a few Yellow warblers in evidence today and still decent numbers of Blue-gray gnatacthers sounding off in the trees. Plenty of "plinking" from Bobolinks above us, none could be counted though, given the fog.

Even thought we might not have had the luck that some other before us had, the birding was still good. And, given a little more time we might have turned up our sought after species. It will be interesting to find out if the CMBO "Birds of Cape May" walk turns up any of those species. Another thought would be to try TNC's CMMBR as the rain might have added enough water to make the property a little more inviting to would be hungry shorebirds.

While the weather for migration doesn't look to promising for this weekend, the positive side is that many species my not move out. Besides, you never know what you may turn up that has slowly been working it's way south. So don't count birding out for this weekend.

Location: Cape May Point SP
Observation date: 8/23/07
Number of species: 49
Mute Swan 16
Mallard 3
Blue-winged Teal 2
Great Blue Heron 1
Great Egret 12
Snowy Egret 2
Osprey 1
Semipalmated Plover 23
Greater Yellowlegs 8
Lesser Yellowlegs 3
Spotted Sandpiper 1
Sanderling 1
Semipalmated Sandpiper 20
Least Sandpiper 45
White-rumped Sandpiper 1
Pectoral Sandpiper 1
Short-billed Dowitcher 6
Laughing Gull 12
Herring Gull 6
Great Black-backed Gull 4
Royal Tern 2
Common Tern 2
Forster's Tern 16
Least Tern 6
Black Tern 3
Black Skimmer 12
Rock Pigeon 8
Mourning Dove 10
Eastern Kingbird 8
American Crow 2
Purple Martin 22
Tree Swallow 45
Bank Swallow 3
Cliff Swallow 1
Barn Swallow 25
Carolina Chickadee 4
Carolina Wren 6
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher 6
American Robin 5
European Starling X
Cedar Waxwing 15
Yellow Warbler 4
Northern Waterthrush 1
Northern Cardinal 8
Bobolink X
Red-winged Blackbird 26
Orchard Oriole 1
American Goldfinch 2
House Sparrow X
This report was generated automatically by eBird v2(http://ebird.org/)

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