Thread: "birding" fun
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Old 12-05-2008, 02:34 PM
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Thanks for starting this thread, Glen. Now you can continue your DH4 mailplane thread in peace.

I've enjoyed knowing about the nature that I was walking and hiking through since I was a boy, but became a bit more serious about learning about birds when we washed ashore from Japan in Carlisle. Pennsylvania, in 1990, bought a little frame house that backed up on a low bluff overlooking the bottom land of the Conodoguinet creek, and discovered that we had constant backyard visitations from most of the mid-Atlantic backyard birds and the occasional pretty out of town visitor. Two years later, we began making two-three times a year visits to Cape May, New Jersey, and hooked up with the Cape May Bird Observatory.

I'm sending this from Cape May, where we have been enjoying a 12-day holiday. A couple of days ago, I posted the following in Glen's DH4 thread:

"Yesterday, Lil and I walked Two-mile beach, a stretch of unspoiled dunes and flat, hard-packed sand running south along the Atlantic Ocean from Wildwood to the Cold Spring Inlet, the entrance to Cape May Harbor, which is flanked by two long black stone jetties. It is a pleasant walk because of the flatness of the beach gradient (which would make it lousy for amphibious operations -- the landing ships and craft would run ashore a half mile from the beach).

Yesterday, there were thousands of semipalmated sandpipers, sanderlings, and dunlin with a few ruddy turnstones and semipalm. plovers mixed in. Six American oystercatchers flew in -- bright black and white with long orange bills. Offshore, we saw the first of the northern gannets and inshore there were skeins of scoters and black ducks headed south with scoters, loons, and cormorants bobbing on the surface and great black backed and herring gulls ghosting along the edge of the jetty.

"We sat for a long time on the jetty, watching the birds and the in and outbound trawlers, one of which was painted blue and white in a way reminiscent of US 1944 dazzle measures."

Now anyone who knows anything about mid-Atlantic coast birds will have said, "Semipalmated sandpipers at Cape May in December? Say what?"

Let me correct that: the birds I saw were western, not semipamalmated, sandpipers.

Meanwhile, the woods at Cape May Point are full of yellow-rumped warblers with lots of Carolina wrens, Carolina chickadees (we have black-caps in our back yard at Carlisle), mocking birds, and the occasional ruby-crowned kinglet. There are hundred of ducks on the ponds, mostly green-winged teal with a fair number of gadwall, widgeon, and mallards, and a few pintail and hooded mergansers. And coots.

There have been huge kettles of turkey vultures with one or two red-tail or rough-legged hawks in among them. No day goes by with a few sharp-shinned hawks and a sighting of a northern harrier low over the marshes.

It's a very pleasant place to spend time. We rent a cottage at Cape May Point, where I also do some writing and even a little paper modeling from time to time. Eventually will come some photographs when I begin my Cape May thread.

Back to Carlisle on Monday.

Don
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