On Sunday, I made my first stop at the Charles Rogers Preserve in Princeton, where other birders have been reporting good warbler traffic. As I stepped out of my car at the parking lot, plenty of birds were calling.
My warbler brain has not been challenged much this fall, and I struggled at first to make a positive ID on the first yellow-rumped/myrtle warbler I spotted in the bank of trees to the left of the small parking lot and along the front edge of the park’s pond.
My camera roll would leave no doubt that there were many yellow rumps cavorting in the tree tops. I managed several shots of them and put one atop this post.
I also managed to get my first shot of the fall of a white-throated sparrow. There were several off the short trail that leads to a blind in the not-so-swampy swamp opposite the pond.
Another sparrow has been frustrating me in recent weeks, the Lincoln’s sparrow. Other birders have spotted them at Mercer Meadows, and Merlin has been hearing them as I’ve walked the trails. But I had no sightings.
On Saturday morning, other birders I met on the Reed-Bryan side said there were some around. I struck out. But that would change as I crossed over to the Pole Farm side of the park.
At the old AT&T Building One site, I trained my camera on a sparrow sitting on a fence. As I looked through the viewfinder, I figured it was a swamp sparrow. At home, I called the photo up and seeing what appeared to be a buffy wash on the left side of the bird’s breast, my pulse quickened. It might be a Lincoln’s, I thought, A quick check on Apple photos and Merlin confirmed the sighting.
As satisfying that was, it wasn’t the most memorable sighting of the weekend. And no, it wasn’t the rare greater white-fronted goose I spotted Sunday. Rather, it was a human sighting.
On the Reed-Bryan trail, I came upon a group of birders who were participating in the Wings Over Mercer birding competition, one in which I was too lax to enter. Another man was hanging back a bit, and he mentioned he was writing a story about the competition. To our surprise we discovered that he is the brother of one of my former Associated Press colleagues in California.
Fast forward to this afternoon, and I decided to take a late-afternoon stroll at the Pole Farm in hopes of spotting a nighthawk. Reports on them there have come in over the last two weeks, and this would be my third try to find at least one flying overhead.
No dice.
But I was able to close out the week with a couple of photos of a Savannah sparrow sitting prettily atop a tree. 🦅
The Jersey Birder 