My buddy Jim and I drove back to the Lazy Brook Greenway on Saturday in search of bobolinks. which love the tall grasses in the greenway’s open fields. It wasn’t nearly as windy as on our previous visit, and we figured we’d have better chances to photograph the bobolinks.
We started shooting within a few minutes of stepping out of the car. On the visit last month, we saw plenty of male bobolinks, and I can’t recall if we saw any females. This visit was different, as we saw plenty of black, yellow and white males and their lovely tan and yellow female counterparts.
As great as the bobolinks were — and I logged 30 of them, likely an undercount — I was perhaps even more pleased to get shots of a grasshopper sparrow.
Those birds are in short supply in New Jersey, and we saw a couple of them at Lazy Brook. Before arriving there, we stopped at the Cider Mill Grassland Preserve in Flemington. We spotted a grasshopper sparrow singing from a wire, and I’ve chosen one of my shots of it to top this post. The bird set off to the right with the bright blue sky behind it gives a realistic sense of how it looked in the field.
Here are a couple more bobolink shots for fans of those great birds. 🦅
The Jersey Birder 