A return to the Pole Farm, and a surprise at Colonial Lake

Since knee surgery last month, I’ve been itching to get back out with my camera at my favorite birding spots. Having weaned myself off a walker and a cane thanks to terrific medical care and physical therapy, I chose this morning to venture out.

My first stop was the Pole Farm (above), where I took a short walk over about half an hour and saw only four birds: one mystery bird that crossed my path as I got out of my car, a turkey vulture circling overhead and two song sparrows foraging on grass near the parking lot.

I was disappointed with the low bird count, which I attributed to an 18-degree thermometer reading and a bitter wind. I took only a few photos of the song sparrows, then decided to head to Colonial Lake a couple of miles away.

I hoped to find some water birds there, and I did. I estimated 40 ring-billed gulls were flying about, floating in the water and parked on ice sheets. I perked up when I saw common mergansers on the far side of the lake, so I walked along the shore to get across from them.

The wind was brisk, and I had to stand firm to steady my camera and lens against it. I took a few shots of the mergansers and gulls before driving home.

Female common merganser floating on lake, with head feathers blown back by the wind.
Female common merganser.

The mergansers were a bit out of sharp focus range, but I liked one shot of a female common merganser whose head feathers were fluffed up wildly. I saved one photo of one of the males, initially thinking it was a common merganser. But I was mistaken — it was a red-breasted merganser!

I’d seen e-Bird reports of red-breasted mergansers on the Delaware River and near Trenton the past few days, and this was probably one of those birds. They are rare in Mercer County, and this was my first sighting of one here.

For my first birding outing in a few weeks, the red-breasted merganser was a special treat. I look forward to more in the days and weeks ahead. 🦅

Male red-breasted merganser floating on lake, with wet feathers spiked behind its head.
Red-breasted merganser floating on Colonial Lake, with spiked feathers at the back of his head.

A good omen for the Eagles in the Super Bowl

My wife and I were having lunch at the kitchen table when she looked up and saw a bird coming in for a landing on the golf course that adjoins our yard. It was no ordinary bird. On this Super Bowl Sunday, a bald eagle paid us a call, and I consider that a good omen for the Philadelphia Eagles.

While the bird sat in the rough on the 11th hole, I went to fetch my camera. I had to put a fresh battery in and reinsert the SD card, and at that point the bird took off, flying toward our house and to my left. I couldn’t get the camera up quickly enough, and the bird continued through the trees and away.

My wife looked out from the front porch to see if the eagle had landed in a tree, but she found no sign of such. A couple of minutes later, I looked out the back windows and was startled to see the eagle standing in the middle of the retention pond on the 12th hole, roughly 100 yards away.

Bald eagle sitting in a retention pond and taking a sip of water.
Not sharp, but you can see the eagle taking a sip from the pond.

I took one shot through the window, then cautiously stepped out the back door, hoping to avoid any of the ice remaining from an overnight storm. I snapped a couple of shots before the bird took flight. It flew along the 10th fairway, and I had only a partial view of it as it passed the trees between us. It head west to the edge of the golf course and turned south, toward Philadelphia.

The best shot I got was the one topping this post, with the bird flying past the second-floor window of one of the condos on the golf course.

It’s always a thrill to see a bald eagle, even better when one pays a call in your neighborhood. Add to that the presumed good omen for the Eagles, and this became one extra special sighting.

Go birds! 🦅

How to tell downy and hairy woodpeckers apart

I wrote Sunday about the relatively rare appearance of a hairy woodpecker in our yard. But there’s more to the story!

First off, after the male hairy woodpecker appeared in the morning, I looked out the window during lunch to find a female hairy woodpecker on the feeder. That gives me hope that a breeding pair may have moved into the neighborhood.

But a short while later an even more remarkable sight appeared. As I looked out to the feeders, I saw the male hairy woodpecker on the suet feeder again, and beside him on the tube feeder was a downy woodpecker.

What good fortune! Telling those two birds apart is difficult, especially when they are each seen in isolation. But now I was seeing one of each species clamped onto our feeders, about two feet from one another.

I grabbed my camera and started shooting. At one point, the downy — as they often do — popped over to the post holding up the two feeders. The bird moved to the far side and eventually came around to the right, in profile. I just missed getting the two birds back to back. But I did get the photo below showing the downy spreading its wings to get back to the tube feeder and its nyjer seed.

The photo topping this post gives a clearer picture distinguishing the two species, the smaller downy with its wee beak and the larger hairy with its protruding beak.

A while after I put the camera down and finished editing my photos, I looked up to see a red-bellied woodpecker stabbing at the suet.

Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll have three species of woodpeckers snacking on those feeders simultaneously.

I’ll probably faint. 🦅

Downy woodpecker with wings outstretched flies off center pole while hairy woodpecker continues pecky at suet feeder.
The downy takes off back to the tube feeder while the hairy keeps poking at suet.

The eagles are back, and not just at the Super Bowl

The Associated Press has a terrific story out today on the resurgence of the bald eagle, and I’m quoted in it. Having headed several AP bureaus and served as a university spokesperson, I’m accustomed to speaking with reporters.

But this is the first time I can recall being quoted as an individual, in this case as a birder familiar with bald eagles in New Jersey.

Trenton-based AP reporter Mike Catalini found this blog and contacted me by email several days ago, looking for a birder to comment on the improving fortunes of our national bird. We had a nice conversation by telephone.

Riffing off the Philadelphia Eagles’ Super Bowl appearance this weekend, Mike wrote a fine story that includes a concise history of how bald eagles, nearly wiped out by DDT, have rallied in the last few decades to shed their endangered status.

Here’s hoping the Eagles will follow with a few rallies of their own this weekend. 🦅

A hairy woodpecker pays a rare call

Sometimes it takes a while for the bird recognition neurons in my brain to kick in. That happened this morning as I was looking out the windows toward our backyard feeders.

I’d watched a female downy woodpecker fly onto the suet feeder and munch a while before flitting off. A few minutes later, another woodpecker arrived, this one with the red cap at the back of its head. Ah, that must be the male, I reckoned.

I watched the bird peck away for a minute or so when it dawned on me that the bird was about as tall as the suet cake, much larger than the female that preceded it. Then I took a hard look at the bird’s bill. It wasn’t the stubby bill of a downy but longer and proportionally larger relative to the bird’s head.

Then the neuron fired — hairy woodpecker!

I popped over to my camera and blasted off several shots of Mr. Hairy. To help others and to reinforce the identifying cues in my brain, I’m posting below a shot I took last January of a downy woodpecker on the suet feeder. Note how it’s not as tall as the suet cake or the cage. In contrast, the head of the hairy woodpecker in the photo atop this post is even with the top of the cage, and its tail extends below the cage.

Downy woodpecker at suet cage.
Male downy woodpecker at the suet cage, January 2024.

Here’s another shot of the hairy woodpecker for comparison purposes. 🦅

Hairy woodpecker on a suet cage feeder.
Hairy woodpecker on the suet cage.

Wings clipped, I can still do some birding

Last week I had knee replacement surgery, and it will be a few if not several weeks before I can get back out into the fields. Even though I’m largely homebound, I can still partake of the pleasure of watching the birds through the windows that frame our backyard and the golf course beyond it.

Yesterday was sunny, and a Carolina wren that was snacking at our suet feeder was my cue to pick up my camera and stake out a spot on a chair near the back door.

I blasted off several shots of the wren and also aimed at a few dark-eyed juncos, mourning doves, house sparrows, a downy woodpecker and a squirrel. Some were photogenic than others, and I have chosen accordingly for this post. 🦅

Female downy woodpecker clings to the side of a tube feeder.
Female downy woodpecker on the tube feeder.

‘Wingspan’ is a great game for birders and birders-to-be

Even if you aren’t a birder, you very likely will like Wingspan, a popular board game released in 2019 that challenges players to develop bird populations in forest, grassland and wetland habitats.

If you are a birder and haven’t yet played Wingspan, you probably will soon, either at the invitation of a friend who has it or you decide to buy it yourself.

I first played it with my daughter and her family last year. One of my sons sent us our own game ahead of a recent visit to help out while I recover from knee surgery.

From a birder’s perspective, the game is a delight. Cards for 170 birds in the main edition are beautifully drawn and list details about each bird’s characteristics such as diet and habitat.

The object of the game is to score more points than your opponents, and you do so by accumulating and placing on the board birds with varying values. Some birds can be placed in multiple habitats while others are limited to one.

To get the birds onto the board, you have to provide their proper foods — berries, grain, rodents, etc. Bonus cards get you extra points. For example, one time I played I got extra points for birds with geographical references in their names, as in Canada Goose or American tree sparrow.

You can also score points by laying and accumulating eggs placed in multiple nest styles.

Over four rounds, your fortunes shift. As with many modern board games, the play is complicated, and it can take you a few rounds to get the hang of strategy.

As each bird card is revealed, I get a small rush of recognition — “I have photos of that one!” or “Ooh, I’d love to see one of those!”

There a couple of international editions of Wingspan if you’re looking for additional challenges.

Win or lose, you pick up new facts about our feathered friends each time you play. You might also get a friend or family member interested in doing some birding. 🦅

A cold morning for sparrows

We’re at the front end of a cold snap that will bring temperatures down into the single digits Fahrenheit for a few days. We had two to three inches of snow fall yesterday, and I pulled on my Muck boots to head to the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm.

It was slim pickings for birds. I saw a couple of sparrows flash past me as I started up the trail. Without a cloud in the sky, the sunshine nearly blinded me as I tried to focus on one of the sparrows perched on a stalk of grass.

In such intense sunlight, I had to nudge my hat into a cockeyed angle to shield the viewfinder. I wasn’t sure if I’d even get a shot fair enough to identify the bird.

After shooting several frames, I moved on and spotted a Northern harrier flying along the tree line nearly half a mile away. She would not come any closer.

Off the trail in a small tree, I spotted a plump sparrow sunning itself. In tough sun again, I was able to focus more easily than on the first sparrow. The bird in tree was a Savannah sparrow, and it’s the bird shown in the top photo on this post.

That first sparrow I shot? Of the 20 or so shots I took in its direction, half missed the bird entirely and I got one reasonably clear shot that established its identity as an American tree sparrow.

American tree sparrow, with it’s bi-colored beak and rufous cap. I’m happy that my camera was able to get this shot while I was shooting blind a good distance from the bird.

It’s a rare day when I only report three species at the Pole Farm, and I feel lucky at that because the harrier was the only ID I knew for sure.

I should add that I only walked a quarter mile up the trail and returned, a much shorter jaunt than my usual mile or two. But it was cold out, and I had to get home to shovel my sidewalk.

I’m warm now, pondering whether I should venture out again. At mid-morning, the light is awesome … 🦅

A sure thing: great blue herons in Princeton

Whether it’s a single bird or one of many, I can count on seeing and photographing great blue herons at the Millstone River Impoundment in Princeton. At first this morning, I didn’t see the heron in its usual spot just off the pedestrian bridges over the Delaware and Raritan canal.

I walked on the east side of the canal and made a loop back on the west side, where I stopped on the edge of the water just before I turned back to my car. I spotted an immature bald eagle flying away from me, and I raised my camera only to get a few fleeting shots as it hurried off. But moments later a heron came flying across the water and looped back toward me.

The sky was cloudy, but I caught a break as the sun peeked out as the heron came sailing toward me. The photo topping the post was the best of those I took, and if you look closely, you can see water glistening on the bird’s feet.

Some hooded mergansers paraded by as well, backlit as they made their way from my right to my left. 🦅

A female hooded merganser and two males float right to left.
With a female in the lead, three hooded mergansers float on Lake Carnegie.

Surprise! It’s a hermit thrush

One of the joys of photographing birds is the unexpected bird that shows up on your computer screen, as happened to me this morning. I was on one of my usual two-mile loops at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm, walking the trail counterclockwise, when I spotted a couple of bluebirds in a tree with small red berries.

The bluebirds were a small surprise in that I usually see them in other parts of the park. But through my binoculars and a quick check of the first few shots I took on my camera, I could see they were definitely bluebirds. When a third bird flew into the tree, I figured it was one more bluebird.

At home, I brought up my photos on the screen and was pleased to see the image topping this post. The bird’s right wing is extended, and its beak is snatching one of the berries.

Hermit thrush partially obscured by the branch on which it is perched.
Hermit thrush.

The bird’s head, however, had what appeared to be the barest minimum of blue for an Eastern bluebird. Then I noticed the streaked breast and finally the eye ring. That’s not a bluebird, I thought, it’s a hermit thrush!

While hermit thrushes are not unknown at the Pole Farm, I sight them infrequently. To erase any lingering doubts, I put the photos into Merlin, which confirmed hermit thrush.

When I added the thrush to my e-Bird report, I was surprised again. The hermit thrush was, logically, listed under Thrushes. But so were the Eastern bluebirds, which if I’d known were thrushes I had forgotten.

Speaking of bluebirds, I was able to get a couple of photos of them in the same tree that the hermit thrush had visited. The shots were tricky because the bluebirds were most of the time perched amid small branches.

It was difficult to get a clear shot, and I was pleased that my Canon R7 had managed to focus sharply on the birds’ eyes for a few well-focused shots. They give me hope that I’m starting to improve in mastering the auto-focus capabilities of the camera.

An Eastern bluebird perched in a cluster of branches on a tree.
An Eastern bluebird tucked amid the branches of a tree.

On the home stretch of my walk back to my car, I encountered another bluebird surprisingly close to me. I was able to get off a couple of over-its-shoulder shots before it flew off. A few minutes later, a Northern flicker flew into the row of trees but took off before I could raise my camera.

While I missed a flicker shot, I have the thrush and bluebirds to remember the day by. No complaints! 🦅

Eastern bluebird perched on a tree, in three-quarter view from behind.
Eastern bluebird No. 3 on the day.