While birds are my primary photographic target on my outings, I also get to encounter other forms of wildlife, most often white-tailed deer. The fact is, I see deer almost every day, and sadly most of them lay mangled and dead on the side of many of the roads and freeways in my part of the world.
A buck grazes on the Reed-Bryan Farm side of Mercer Meadows.
While my wife is at war with the deer that munch the flowers in our yard, I’m happy to see them popping in and out of the trees and fields at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm. Often, I’ll spot the flick of an ear across a meadow and initially think it’s a bird before wising up.
Of all my deer photos, my favorite is the one atop this post. I shot it near the Pole Farm observation deck on April 4. I must have spooked her, and I was quick enough to capture her bounding away.
Mercer County does a deer cull every fall into winter, and I always tell the deer I see on the trails to be alert for the hunters. When the cull is over, I congratulate those who made it through safely — and remind them to stay off the roads. 🦅
Seemingly oblivious to the birders strolling a few yards away, a doe feeds not far from the edge of a trail at the Pole Farm.
The American kestrel is a threatened species, particularly in the Northeastern United States. But we have encouraging news from the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm. Breeding pairs are making the park their home, and we have more kestrels today than we did in previous years.
When they’re not hovering over the meadows, looking for prey, the kestrels can often be spotted sitting atop bird boxes in the middle of the fields, far back from the trails we humans tread. There were enough kestrels living at the park last summer that Mercer County naturalists came to band several of them. Friends have heard from rangers that we have five breeding pairs in residence now. UPDATE: The county says there are at least seven kestrel nests in the park!
Kestrel in
One of the pairs has taken up residence in the maintenance barn beside the primary parking lot for the park, where Cold Soil Road dead-ends into Keefe Road. For the last few weeks in the hour or two after sunrise, at lease one of the kestrels has perched on the big tree to the right as you exit the lot and start up the paved trail.
My birding buddies and I have staked out spots between the barn and the tree. We’ve watched the kestrels fly to and from not only the one tree and another tall one across the path, but they’ve also flown in and out of a hole in the barn wall, just beneath the peak on the side facing the parking lot.
Judging by the frequency of the flights, we’re convinced the couple have chicks inside and are feeding them seemingly continuously. It won’t be long before the young ones fledge.
If you’d like to see the kestrels, I recommend that you arrive at the Cold Soil lot around 7 a.m. As you pull into the park, look up toward the big tree just right of the paved path. Odds are decent that you’ll spot one of the kestrels perched on a bare branch at about 2 o’clock on the clock face mapped onto the tree.
Park and step out onto the paved path. Check the hole in the barn to see if one of the birds is perched there. My friend Andy got a photo of two birds in the hole the other day.
Kestrel perched on the edge of the hole in the barn.
The birds stay fairly high up and don’t seem to get spooked by people pointing binoculars or cameras at them, so it’s possible you can get a good look. But they are wild creatures and will take off in the blink of an eye or the moment you turn your head.
I’m rooting for these magnificent birds to be fruitful and multiply. 🦅
My friend Andy and I took our usual route at the Mercer Meadows Pole farm this morning. Piercing the gloom of the heavy overcast conditions was this pair of fledgling Eastern bluebirds huddled on the ground.
It’s great to see these and other newly hatched birds, reminding us that avian life is perpetuating itself. We’ve heard there are five breeding pairs of American kestrels in the park, another welcome sign of renewal.
Returning to the city of my birth for a weekend visit, I decided to check out the Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve and do a bit of birding. It was a great choice.
As luck would have it on this beautiful, sunny Saturday morning, the park was full of birds. I had barely walked out of the parking lot when I heard yellow warblers and immediately spotted two of them in a nearby tree.
Yellow warbler, one of several I heard during my 1 hour, 20 minute ramble.
The park is a small peninsula jutting out into Lake Erie a few miles east of downtown Cleveland. The park was built on sediment dredged from the lake in a spot near two old freighters that were junked offshore to serve as a wave break. We passed those old freighters many times when I was a kid, watching them slowly recede below the water over the years.
The park has a loop trail just under 3 miles long that traces the perimeter along the lake. I walked about half of it, going counterclockwise from the trailhead. Just under a mile out, I reached a good spot to take a few photos of downtown, then cut over on the Monarch Trail to save some time and steps.
Tree swallow atop one of the trail markers.
The path almost all of the way was flat and easy to travel, most of it with grass and clover underfoot and gravel in a few sections. Posts every tenth of a mile let you know where you were in relation to the overall trail system, and I appreciated the benches that were placed at many of the markers. Several faced the lake, on which I only spotted a few gulls and Canada geese plus a pair of mallards.
But the trees and gullies along the trails were teeming with birds. I also saw a couple of squirrels and two deer.
Cleveland was sarcastically called “the mistake on the lake” for many years from the late 1960s onward, a reputation it received for urban decay and an environmental atmosphere so lousy that the polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire several times.
Cleveland has done a great job turning things around in many ways, and I was greatly impressed by the preserve — which I hope helps restore my hometown to the slogan used in the 1970s to counter its poor reputation: “the best things in life are here.”
My outings have been limited of late, so I’ve been a bit behind my warbler counts of previous years. I had been hearing yellow warblers singing in some of the usual spots where they congregate at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm, but until yesterday I had not put my eyes on one.
As luck would have it, late in my walk I heard one singing and spotted it high up in a tree, with a fair amount of sun shining on it. The bird was turned slightly to the side and it stayed in place long enough for me to get a few shots and walk back to my car with a smile on my face.
Before switching to digital cameras, I spent decades parsimoniously snapping shots on 24- or 36-shot rolls of film, not wanting to waste anything. But digital cameras have freed us from such restraints, which has been a particular boon to us photographers who delight in photographing swift-winged birds.
As I walked at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm this morning, I kept getting hits from Merlin on grasshopper sparrows in a section where the central dirt path bisecting two big fields approaches the woods. As usual, I swept the fields, straining to find one of these uncommon sparrows without luck, although I did hear their buzzy calls a couple of times.
At one point, I spotted a sparrow sitting on a stalk a good way off the path. I couldn’t make it out and figured it was another of the many song sparrows and field sparrows whose melodies routinely fill the fields. I took a couple of shots anyway, then trudged on for what would be a two-mile circuit that I’ve made many times before.
The grasshopper sparrow. Note the wing pattern and pale, mostly plain breast.
When I got home and pulled the images up on screen, I found two frames of the sparrow and was initially puzzled. The bird’s breast and head were relatively plain, and the wings had a tiered look about them. That’s when I realized it was almost certainly a grasshopper sparrow, which Merlin confirmed.
I’ve taken better grasshopper shots from closer up, but I got a small birder’s high on realizing that I’d captured a couple of frames of a bird I occasionally hear and infrequently see, let alone photograph. And I didn’t burn any film in doing so!
My pledge to finish my goal of visiting the remaining New Jersey counties where I have not gone birding had stagnated, as I had made no progress whatsoever this year. When I discovered early Sunday that I had reason to go to Passaic County to watch a baseball game, I couldn’t pass up the chance to tack on a birding stop.
The ballgame was a Princeton-Penn Ivy League playoff at Yogi Berra Stadium in Little Falls on the campus of Montclair State University. I Googled birding hotspots nearby. Rifle Camp Park was the closest for which e-Bird showed substantial sightings, so I headed there in the afternoon.
After a false start on one trail, I drove to a parking lot designated as “Pond Area” and headed uphill onto what turned out to be the red trail. Quickly I spotted a bird on a branch ahead of me and raised my binoculars. The robin-sized bird was looking straight at me, and my first thought was “veery.”
By the time I raised my camera, the bird had flitted to a couple of other branches and I was able to get a few shots. The bird flew off and I reversed course to follow, and I got a couple more shots. I wandered downhill to the pond, where the only birds I spotted were two Canada geese floating. But there were bullfrogs calling, so I got a photo of one of them.
American bullfrog croaking at the edge of the pond.
I walked back uphill to my car without encountering any other birds, and I was pleased to think that I’d spotted my first veery in New Jersey (I had seen one in the Philadelphia area previously). I completed my e-Bird checklist listing “veery,” and I’d have to wait several hours before I could confirm it from my photos via the Merlin app.
As it turns out, I did not see a veery but a Swainson’s thrush. Although the birds are somewhat similar, the thrush has a much darker back than a veery, and this bird (shown in the photo atop this post) definitely fit the Swainson’s description. Although I’d seen Swainson’s thrushes before, I’d never gotten a close look, let alone a photo of one. I’m quite happy with the shots I got.
Meantime, I still have nine counties to go before I fill in the map.
Addendum: I also filed an incidental report to e-Bird from the ballpark, which I discovered is in Essex County. To my surprise, I thus actually added two counties from yesterday’s jaunt.
Passaic County is at the top, the middle of the three counties bordering New York.
Catbirds are ubiquitous in my part of the world. With their Mohawk hairdos, they show up at the feeders at home and chatter away in the trees whenever I venture out to the parks nearby and beyond.
This morning, the gray catbird pictured above was perched on a bare tree — in the catbird seat, so to speak — as I approached on a trail at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm.
I got to wondering, where did the common expression about someone being in the catbird seat originate? Off to Wikipedia I went, and I found an entry that traces the phrase’s origin to the American South in the 19th Century. The first printed reference, the entry says, was from a 1942 short story by American humorist James Thurber, long a favorite author of mine.
There’s even a baseball angle, according to Wikipedia. Hall of Fame broadcaster Red Barber used the phrase liberally when calling games, which is probably where Thurber picked it up. Barber (1908-1992) grew up in Mississippi and Florida, where the phrase was presumably in vogue.
Whether they’re cackling or mewing, catbirds add a dash of humor to daily life. As another great baseball broadcaster, Mel Allen, was fond of saying, “How about that!”
One of the pleasures of birding is meeting birders from other territories, and I had that pleasure again Sunday. My birding buddy Laura and I met at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm with a couple from Quebec to whom we’d been introduced by another work colleague.
Under an overcast sky and drizzling rain, the four of us strolled for two and a half hours along some of the main trails, much of it spent comparing notes on the birds we commonly see and those we don’t. While field sparrows are ubiquitous at the Pole Farm, for our visitors they were lifers.
When we transitioned from the fields along the central path into the back woods, full of wood thrush song, we were on alert for warblers. But other than hearing a couple of ovenbirds, we didn’t see any flitting among the trees until late in our walk.
Then just ahead and not far overhead, a black and white warbler appeared. In typical warbler fashion, it darted from branch to branch before heading off. I took several shots, most of them blurry. But I managed to get one in focus,. It tops this post and will serve as a reminder of a memorable day with new friends, with whom I hope to do more birding north of the border some day.
As ubiquitous as the blue jay is in much of this part of the world, I’ve taken relatively few photos of them in wild, especially when compared with many less common species. Early in my walk this morning at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm, I spotted one sitting regally atop a tree and snapped away.
I’m pleased with the result.
Late this afternoon after a short rain shower passed through, I headed out to the Dyson Tract along the Delaware and Raritan Canal, and I got a surprise — from my camera.
As I walked out of the parking lot, I immediately spotted a plump Eastern phoebe in bushes along the canal. I raised the camera to focus but it wouldn’t fire. The camera screen showed a message that the SD card was locked.
I started searching the menu for a control to unlock the SD card, a situation I never anticipated or even knew was possible. Not finding anything in the menus, I used Google on my iPhone to search for a solution for my Canon camera. The answers said the lock control was on the card itself, so I pulled it out and tried to find it. No luck, so I headed back to the car and went to the backup card I keep in the vehicle.
The camera worked again, and after my walk I found the YouTube video below on how to salvage the card by wrapping a bit of cellophane tape on it. I had all my images downloaded from that card, and I’m not going to bother with trying to fix it. I’ll order a new one and thank my lucky stars that I was smart enough to keep that spare in the car.
The Jersey Birder 