With the Atlantic City skyline in the distance, my friend Jim and I explored the Great Bay Boulevard Wildlife Management Area in Little Egg Harbor Township today. I added five species to my life list. Even better, I got photos of each.
I’m topping this post with a photo of one of those, a saltmarsh sparrow. We heard these coastal birds at our first stop along the road that cuts into the flat expanses of land and estuary on a peninsula jutting out of the New Jersey coast.
The saltmarsh sparrow looks like a darker version of the Savannah sparrow, with a more vivid yellow streak on its head.
We heard them before we saw them. Ahead of that, we saw several seaside sparrows, another of the day’s lifers for me.
The seaside sparrow is a drab, dark brown-gray. It, too, has some yellow on its head, but a much shorter run of it than the saltmarsh sparrow.
As we drove along the road and pulled over at several points, we spotted greater black-backed gulls, laughing gulls, red-winged blackbirds, great and snowy egrets, and a couple of Forster’s terns. Add to that several willets (lifer No. 3 on the day) that were much easier to spot than the small sparrows.
We traveled over several bridges, including a couple of narrow, wood-planked spans where we had to slalom our way through several people fishing off the side rails.
Eventually, we reached the end of the road, where another wooden bridge leads to a Rutgers University research station. We were able to walk up the bridge a hundred yards or so until a locked security fence blocked the way.
Looking off one side of the bridge, we scanned the land dotted with small pools of water. We were hoping to spot a clapper rail, as we’d heard a few of them on prior stops.
We got lucky. Jim spotted one (lifer No. 4) walking through the grasses. It may have sensed our presence, as it scurried along at one point before slowing and going to ground in some grasses along the road.
On our way to and from the end of the road, we spotted black- and yellow-crowned night herons. At our next-to-last stop on the way back, we got photos of both, and my car was invaded by greenhead horse flies. Those nasty critters had been kept at bay by the breezes for the first two hours of our visit, but as the temperature warmed they came out in force. Fortunately, neither Jim nor I was bitten by one of them, although I had to shoe them out of the car a few times and even still had three of them hitching a ride until I got home.
Lifer No. 5 was still to come. As we headed back toward civilization, Jim spotted a glossy ibis foraging in the grasses to our left. We got out of the car and did our best to get the ibis (an increasing presence in New Jersey in these warming years) on camera.
The five lifers took my life list up to 252, and my state total for the year is up to 156. I’m aiming to beat my previous best, 175 in 2022. Wish me luck! 🦅
The Jersey Birder 