My buddy Jim and I headed south once more today to the Pine Barrens, hoping to find a summer tanager in Brendan T. Byrne State Forest. In my Subaru Outback, we crawled along some sandy trails and negotiated many large puddles to get deep into the woods.
Alas, no summer tanagers brightened our day, even in a sector of the park where Jim has found them several years in a row.
Our luck changed when we drove to a park campground a few miles away at Pakim Pond. We wandered a couple of trails and entered a section of trees busy with birds.
A pine warbler’s call tipped us to the action in the pitch pines, and then the black-and-white warblers showed up. Two were high up and tough to shoot, but popped up on the other side of the road we were standing on and checked out two trees to give us good looks.
After a few minutes, the bird settled onto a single branch and stayed a while. It was a virtual studio portrait session. I found it hard to pick a favorite from the selection of shots I got. I topped the post with a horizontal image that captures not only the bird but the leaves behind it dappled by sunshine. The photo also shows the crusty bark of the trunk of the tree in which the bird parked.
I was also able to get a couple of shots of a pine warbler that landed nearby.
We made one more stop, leaving the forest to head to the hamlet of Whitesbog, historic home of cranberry and blueberry cultivation. Driving past a. couple of stores and a few homes and through the village’s lone intersection, we headed onto the dirt roads that delineate the bogs outside the town.
Jim was keen to explore the banks, in hopes that the previous day’s heavy storms had coaxed some shore birds inland to the bogs. We stopped in one spot and watched tree swallows skim the water for bugs. After walking over to another bog, Jim got his wish: solitary sandpipers were treading the mud and grasses not covered by water. We also spotted a couple of least sandpipers.
The solitary sandpiper is the “bird of the day” in the Merlin app, and I was happy to make that ID, unexpected as it was. š¦
The Jersey Birder 