Birding joy: Finding the unexpected on your camera roll

It happens frequently on my outings that I point my binoculars at a distant bird and can’t figure out what it is. If I’m lucky, I have enough time to point my camera and capture a few frames, hoping that the bird’s identity will be revealed once I get the images up on screen back home.

The past three days are cases in point. On Saturday, I went to John A. Roebling Park in Trenton to see what was happening at Abbott Marshlands. A lot of birds were out on Spring Lake with the two mute swans who have been in residence for many months.

A couple of birders making their way back to the parking lot had a seen a redhead through a scope. I wouldn’t find it but I was able to learn from the birders that the birds floating in the center of the lake were mostly gadwalls. I couldn’t figure out exactly what they were by peering through my binoculars but I squeezed off several frames in my camera, hoping they’d reveal what was out there.

When I got home, I was able to confirm that several gadwalls were floating near the swans, but as I zoomed in, I spotted a pair of birds that clearly weren’t gadwalls. One had a two-tone head, appearing green and brown through the grainy image on my screen. The image I cropped was too poor for the Merlin app to assess, so I put the image up on the Central New Jersey Birding Facebook group and hoped for an expert to weigh in.

Within minutes, I had the answer: it was a pair of American wigeons, something I wasn’t expecting to see.

My camera paid off again Sunday on the Reed-Bryan Farm side of Mercer Meadows. As I came down the path from the parking lot, I spotted a bird atop one of the dead trees spiking out of the gully to the left. The bird was in shadow and I had no chance at an id through my binoculars. Maybe a kestrel, I thought, but I hadn’t a clue. I pointed my Canon and hoped for the best.

As I returned to the parking lot, two big black birds came swooping in. One flew overhead and the light was right, so I raised by camera and blasted off a few frames. Turkey vultures, I figured, with just a nagging touch of uncertainty in my head.

Home I went, and I first called up the putative vulture images on my laptop screen. Not so! It was a common raven, a bird that isn’t often spotted at Mercer Meadows.

I moved down several frames to the bird in shadow, and my decision about 18 months ago to switch to shooting RAW images paid off again. A quick auto-fix of the image revealed the bird was a merlin, which made perfect sense. Merlins often sit atop those dead trees in that part of the park.

With Monday off for the Martin Luther King holiday, I did a morning Pole Farm visit, drove up to Somerset County to look in vain for sandhill cranes and made a final outing in the afternoon at Colonial Lake and Park near home.

It was all mallards and ring-billed gulls, or so it seemed until I started making my way back to my car. Across the lake I spotted a small group of birds on the water. Through my binoculars, I could make out a male common merganser to my left and a male hooded merganser to my right. In between were a few brown birds, which I figured were females. But of which type of merganser?

The camera again captured enough detail so that when I got home and brought the images on screen, I could make out the puffy heads of what clearly were female hooded mergansers.

Many birders get by on the naked eye and binoculars. I suppose I could, too, but for me, the camera and my zoom lens are essential equipment that bring more joy of discovery day after day.