A Winter Day at the Beach

Yesterday the heater in my building was on the fritz, so I decided that if I was going to freeze anyway, I might as well go outside and see some birds while doing it. (Plus I can’t easily type when the temperature in my office drops below 20°).

I headed out out to Jacob Riis Park to track down a pair of Harlequin Ducks that had been reported there. The Q35 bus dropped me off at Fort Tilden, where I quickly started my day list with Mallard and American Crow, as well as the usual wintering flock of hundreds of Brant.

Brant’s an unusual goose. There are tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of them all along the eastern seaboard this time of year. However they’re very rare even one or two miles inland. Unless you go to the beach in the wintertime, you might never know this bird exists.

I was on a mission though; so rather than stopping to scan the flock for a possible but unlikely Black Brant, I hoofed it over to Jacob Riis boardwalk, picking up Song Sparrow on the way. I didn’t find the Harlequins, just House Sparrows, European Starlings, Rock Pigeons, the usual three gull species (Herring, Ring-billed, and Great Black-backed) and an American Goldfinch. I kept scanning the gulls hoping to pick out the Glaucous Gull Starr Saphir had reported Monday, but no luck there either. At this point, it could be hundreds of miles away or right around the curve in the beach. There’s no way to know for sure. However on the way back I did spot a lone female Snow Bunting in the picnic grounds:

After back tracking to Riis Landing, I ran into Shane Blodgett who was also out looking for the Harlequins. He had a scope so we went back to the boardwalk to take another look, but they still weren’t there. We also checked a few spots along the Fort Tilden shoreline, and found some Sanderlings, a few Red-breasted Mergansers, and a Black-capped Chickadee or two; but no Harlequins.

We took our final shot down the road at Breezy Point. This was the best site of the day. The Bay side in particular was packed with Ring-billed Gulls, Great Black-backed Gulls, Herring Gulls, Sanderlings, Red-breasted Mergansers, Common Loons, a couple of Red-throated Loons, Great Cormorants, Bufflehead, and about 1750 Long-tailed Ducks. The Long-tailed flock was the largest either of us had ever seen, and might still be visible from the Coney Island side of the bay at the intersection of the boardwalk with Ocean Parkway and points east, if anyone cares to go look. Walking west along the beach we scared up one late Killdeer. Otherwise it was more of the same out to the Jetty, where Shane spotted the first Lesser Black-backed Gull of the year. This bird’s a regular European vagrant. It’s a little smaller than a Herring Gull, but looks like a lighter Great Black-backed Gull. Shane also spotted roughly 10 Common Eider. Still no Harlequins though.

We scanned the jetty for Purple Sandpiper, but no luck. Other birders have reported it there in the last few days, but once again I missed it. This may be my nemesis bird. Certainly there’s no other bird I’ve looked for as frequently with as much effort and as little success as this one.

Walking back to the Fisherman’s trail, we spotted hundred of sanderlings feeding in the tidal region, as well as one lone scoter flying swiftly North. Shane wasn’t able to scope it quickly enough to get a clear species ID though. Black Scoter seems most probable, but that’s really just a guess. Along the path back to the car we picked up our last bird of the day, Yellow-rumped Warbler, the only warbler species that overwinters here in New York. By this time it was almost 5:00 P.M. and the light was dying; but we took one quick spin around Floyd Bennett Field to look for Short-eared Owl. No luck. All we picked up was Canada Goose, before we called it a night.

So I didn’t get either Harlequin Duck or Purple Sandpiper, but we did get at least a couple of hard birds for New York City (Common Eider, Lesser-Black-backed Gull), so the day still turned out pretty nice. My year list has now reached 53 species. Unless someone reports something unusual, I think my next expedition will be Owls Head Park and the path from there along the shore to the Verrazano Narrows bridge and Coney Island to try for Purple Sandpiper again. Wish me luck.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 5th, 2006 at 9:58 AM and is filed under Birding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment, Digg this story, or trackback from your own site.