‘Tis the season for huge flocks of common grackles to fill the sky and, in recent days, descend into the front and back yards of our home. A quick Google search revealed that groups of the stolid black birds with iridescent purple heads can be called a flock or, more pointedly, a plague or an annoyance.
On a recent morning at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm, I watched in awe as at least 200 grackles flew overhead in a long, sinuous column. I figured it wouldn’t be long before a swarm would find our property.
Twice in the last three days, I’ve looked out our back windows to find grackles covering our yard and attacking the suet feeder. Often, five or six of them will slam into one another as they fight for morsels from the cage.
Three grackles set upon our suet feeder in 2024.
The birds will stay for a few minutes and then, spooked by who knows what, take off en masse and land in a neighbor’s yard or on the adjoining golf course.
The flocks are impressive, if a bit intimidating, like a black-jacketed motorcyle gang showing up at a block party.
The grackles chow down heartily on our suet, but I don’t begrudge them the treat. In our yard, whatever food I set out for our feathered friends is available to all as their diets demand, table manners not required. 🦅
The other day I was telling a fellow birder that I’ve been wondering why I hadn’t seen many seagulls where I normally see them, such as at Colonial Lake. It also includes the Lawrence Shopping Center on the opposite side of Business Route 1, where ring-billed gulls often hover over the parking lot, looking for pizza crusts or other treats that we humans drop onto the pavement.
I did see a good number of herring gulls recently at Abbott Marshlands in Trenton, the first notable activity I’d seen in months.
Things changed today when I went to the Millstone River Impoundment in Princeton. As soon as I got out of my car, I spotted several gulls flying overhead. They were ring-billed gulls, I soon determined as I looked through my binoculars at half a dozen of them bobbing on Lake Carnegie.
One of the gulls was standing on the railing of the wooden bridge that leads pedestrians over the waters at the edge of the lake and the Delaware and Raritan Canal. The gull was on the far side of the bridge, and I took a few shots from two spots as I crossed the bridge. Every other time I crossed that bridge with a gull parked on the railing, the birds always took off as I came closer.
The gull on the bridge, its portrait taken when I was roughly 20 feet from it.
This time, the bird was amazingly calm. I passed by it, saying softly: “It’s OK. No need to go.” And so it stayed as I walked on.
The other highlight from the visit was a red-bellied woodpecker that was squawking repeatedly above me as I walked on the canal towpath. I finally spotted him in a bare tree that had several cavities in its trunk.
I took several shots, then realized I didn’t have the bird’s beak clear of the trunk. I took a couple of steps to my right to get the full bird. The sunlight illuminated the bird well, and the trunk and branches made for dramatic framing. 🦅
With the thermometer at 30 degrees this morning, we had our first frost of the fall. It turned out to be a decent day for birding. I hadn’t been to the Reed-Bryan Farm side of Mercer Meadows for a while and decided to go there rather than to the Pole Farm side of the park.
Cooper’s hawk in the morning sun.
The biggest bird surprise and the best photo opportunity came as I was heading up the trail to return to my car. About 40 feet in front of me, a Cooper’s hawk was sitting out in the open atop a tree branch at the edge of the path.
I snapped a couple of shots, marveling at how close I was to the bird. It flew off once I took a few steps to try to get a slightly better angle, but no matter. The photos did the bird justice, showing its gleaming yellow eye and some nice detail on its feathers.
I was grateful that the sun was shining fully at that point. It was still coming up over the horizon when I arrived. As usual, I spotted several sparrows crossing the trail and feeding along the edges. But the birds were in heavy shadow, so it was hard to tell the song sparrows from the Savannah sparrows.
A Savannah sparrow forages on the frosty grass beside the trail.
Merlin was also hearing swamp sparrows, and I eventually got a firm ID on one farther along. Through my binoculars, I could see one tucked in the tall grasses. I pulled up my camera and managed to get focus lock for a couple of clear shots.
Swamp sparrow lurking in the grasses.
Only a few weeks ago, I was birding in shorts and a T-shirt, but as the temperature has begun to drop I’m clad in jeans and a jacket. It won’t belong before I break out the gloves and maybe smack a few hand warmers for the cold days ahead.
I don’t mind the cold, as long as the birds keep coming! 🦅
I’ve only birded casually in New York City, mainly in Central Park. It’s almost impossible to walk in the Big Apple without encountering a rock dove (or 200).
As for bluebirds, I’d love to see one in the big city, but I figure I’m much more likely to find one in the rural parts of the state.
As many times as I’ve seen pigeons in New York, I can’t find any photos that I’ve taken of them. That’s why there’s a freebie at the top of this post from the Pexels package WordPress offers its users.
While I’m not as big a fan of pigeons as Bert is on Sesame Street, I do hope to snap a few photos of them one of these days. 🦅
Over the weekend, I spent two mornings at Mercer Meadows with friends, human and avian. While I’m still awaiting the arrival of more Northern harriers, I’m pleased to report that the Savannah sparrows have been arriving steadily.
My friend Sally had mentioned that she’d love to see an Eastern meadowlark at the Pole Farm. Since I’d been hearing them the past week, I invited her join me this morning.
On our way up the trail, Merlin heard a couple, but I could not pick out their calls. Little more than an hour later, we had made it back to the parking lot when we heard them calling nearby. We took a short stroll to one of the nearby fields and were thrilled to see a few, including one that flew toward us.
I was too busy looking to get a photo, but the image of its brilliant yellow breast gleaming in the sunshine is burned into memory.
Song and Savannah sparrows were seemingly everywhere in the fields and on the central dirt path. Again, I must note how lovely they – especially the Savannahs – appear against a backdrop of the reds and oranges and tans of autumn foliage.
A Savannah sparrow perches amid red leaves in warm morning light.
We spotted cedar waxwings high up in trees at the AT&T Building One site, and I spotted a field sparrow up high as well.
A field sparrow strikes a cute pose on a tree branch.
We enjoyed hearing many white-throated sparrows singing their bright, whistling song in the woods, and we also spotted a few dark-eyed juncos.
Another highlight of the weekend came Saturday morning when I got a brief glimpse of a red-breasted nuthatch in the woods. Again, no photo, but seeing that uncommon caller was treat enough. 🦅
A dark-eyed junco gazes into the distance from the knuckle of a tree branch on Saturday.
It was a comical scene at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm: my birding buddies Lee, Jim and I we’re standing in front of a section of trees and bushes, watching a ruby-crowned kinglet flit from branch to branch.
Each of is a well-experienced birder and photographer, and we were all bemoaning how quickly the kinglet — just a few yards in front of us — zipped off each time one of us tried to focus. I don’t think any of us got a single shot of the bird, which we spotted at the old AT&T Building One site.
Park managers put in a metal fence at the spot a year or two ago, the kind with rectangular openings on which birds will sometime perch. More often, the fence wires drive our autofocus cameras bonkers as we try to thread a shot through the openings only a few inches wide and tall.
Lee, Jim and I walked a big loop around the park and encountered another birding friend, Michael, near the same spot where we’d been thwarted by the mercurial kinglet. What did Michael say? How hard it is to focus on kinglets through that darn metal fence.
Exactly.
Maybe that’s when the Birding Gods of Irony decided to have their fun with us. We walked out of the woods and started down the central path toward the parking lot when I spotted a small bird at about eye-level on a small tree.
“What is this little guy?” I asked, bringing up my camera to focus on the bird seemingly entwining itself with one of the branches. The bird was in shadow, and I had time to take a few shots, noting that I’d have to figure out the ID when I brought the images up on screen.
When I did so, my first thought was it was a goldfinch, and I amended my e-Bird report, bringing the day’s species count up to 30.
But something about the eye-ring on the bird made me wonder, and I put the photo into Merlin to check myself. Merlin’s answer: ruby crowned kinglet!
I laughed aloud. This one bird of a species almost always so difficult to capture had stayed on a single branch for at least 30 seconds, allowing me to take several shots.
The bird didn’t show its ruby crown, but that’s not unusual. I’ve luckily gotten other shots showing the ruby crown, and on this day I was plenty pleased to get what I got. 🦅
This is a golden time for birding, with the fall color peaking and enough leaves falling to increase the odds of seeing more birds in the branches. This morning was a nice example, as my pal Jim and I headed to the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm.
The sun was out in full, shining liberally on the song, swamp and Savannah sparrows flitting about the fields and woods. A Savannah sitting atop a cluster of red berries tops this post, my best shot of the day.
This handsome swamp sparrow was one of several we saw, but the only one I captured on camera.
Another favorite is this single frame I got of a raggedy-feathered blue jay surrounded by orange leaves, a split second before it flew off.
Blue jay about to launch.
Jim and I made a big loop around the park, and on our way back to the car we saw a lot of activity at a big puddle on the path to the old AT&T Building One site.
Of the hundreds of visits I’ve made to the Pole Farm, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen more than a single bird cavorting in a puddle. Today, white-throated sparrows, yellow-rumped warblers and American robins were dipping in and out of the big puddle. Its water glowed a golden orange, the light reflected from trees in the background.
An American robin sips rom the puddle.
This is also the high season for yellow-rumped warblers. I got one shot of two of them just off the puddle, but it’s a bit dark and, um, muddy. So I’ll close with the following shot of one of the yellow-rumps that settled nearby in slightly better light. 🦅
Yellow-rumped warbler showing off its eye-ring, if not its “butter butt.”
We’ve had a beautiful fall weekend here in central New Jersey, with warmer-than-we-really-should-have temperatures poking into the upper 70s. I was able to get two good outings in at the Mercer Meadow Pole Farm, where sparrows took center stage.
Savannah sparrow
I’m leading the post with two of the Savannah sparrows I saw while walking up the Lawrence Hopewell Trail on Sunday morning. It was the beginning of a five-sparrow-species jaunt over just under three miles.
Savannahs show up in abundance during the fall, although I’ve seen fewer of them than I recall seeing in previous years. This weekend, that may have been in part because I reached the park a few minutes before dawn each day. Like many birds, the Savannahs like the light of day.
Next up in my viewfinder was a swamp sparrow, which was farther back in the grasses but lit nicely by the rising sun. Perhaps to keep balance in the universe, it seems the shortage of Savannahs is offset by a greater-than- previous showing of the swampers.
Swamp sparrow straddling tree branches. Note the drops of moisture on the red leaves above its head.
Once I reached the woods, white-throated sparrows serenaded me with their sweet, high-pitched song. I got a few peekaboo shots, but none of the birds had the courtesy to pose openly for me as the swamp sparrow above did.
I also heard a couple of field sparrows each day, and on Saturday morning I managed a nice shot of one of them that was perched near the old AT&T Building One site.
This sweet little field sparrow stood still just long enough for me to focus.
Also on Saturday, I got my first chipping sparrow of the season. It was on the path near the parking lot at the Pole Farm. I got a soft shot that was sufficient to confirm its ID.
The weekend also brought some nice looks at yellow-rumped warblers, ruby-crowned kinglets and an Eastern phoebe. But the most unexpected joy over the two days was a flock of cedar waxwings that descended in the trees above me as I emerged from the woods to the central path on my way back to my car.
At first, I couldn’t figure out what the birds were. They were chasing each other and darting in the treetops, too quickly for my brain to react. But I was able to get a few clear shots, and from the camera’s playback screen I nailed the ID.
One of the many cedar waxwings that flew in above me Saturday. Their color has faded a bit, but they are still striking.
It seems some of our residents of recent months have flown the coop. I haven’t seen or heard a catbird in a few weeks, and I think the common yellowthroats have headed south. But I saw my first dark-eyed juncos of the season in New York’s Central Park on Saturday afternoon and spotted a couple at the Pole Farm on Sunday.
We’re seeing a changing of the guard, as it were, and that’s something to crow about. 🦅
On Sunday, I made my first stop at the Charles Rogers Preserve in Princeton, where other birders have been reporting good warbler traffic. As I stepped out of my car at the parking lot, plenty of birds were calling.
My warbler brain has not been challenged much this fall, and I struggled at first to make a positive ID on the first yellow-rumped/myrtle warbler I spotted in the bank of trees to the left of the small parking lot and along the front edge of the park’s pond.
My camera roll would leave no doubt that there were many yellow rumps cavorting in the tree tops. I managed several shots of them and put one atop this post.
I also managed to get my first shot of the fall of a white-throated sparrow. There were several off the short trail that leads to a blind in the not-so-swampy swamp opposite the pond.
White throated sparrow lurking in the branches.
Another sparrow has been frustrating me in recent weeks, the Lincoln’s sparrow. Other birders have spotted them at Mercer Meadows, and Merlin has been hearing them as I’ve walked the trails. But I had no sightings.
On Saturday morning, other birders I met on the Reed-Bryan side said there were some around. I struck out. But that would change as I crossed over to the Pole Farm side of the park.
At the old AT&T Building One site, I trained my camera on a sparrow sitting on a fence. As I looked through the viewfinder, I figured it was a swamp sparrow. At home, I called the photo up and seeing what appeared to be a buffy wash on the left side of the bird’s breast, my pulse quickened. It might be a Lincoln’s, I thought, A quick check on Apple photos and Merlin confirmed the sighting.
At last, I had a firm ID and a photo of a Lincoln’s sparrow.
As satisfying that was, it wasn’t the most memorable sighting of the weekend. And no, it wasn’t the rare greater white-fronted goose I spotted Sunday. Rather, it was a human sighting.
On the Reed-Bryan trail, I came upon a group of birders who were participating in the Wings Over Mercer birding competition, one in which I was too lax to enter. Another man was hanging back a bit, and he mentioned he was writing a story about the competition. To our surprise we discovered that he is the brother of one of my former Associated Press colleagues in California.
Savannah sparrow
Fast forward to this afternoon, and I decided to take a late-afternoon stroll at the Pole Farm in hopes of spotting a nighthawk. Reports on them there have come in over the last two weeks, and this would be my third try to find at least one flying overhead.
No dice.
But I was able to close out the week with a couple of photos of a Savannah sparrow sitting prettily atop a tree. 🦅
Where to begin? This weekend has offered a lot of birding thrills in addition to beautiful weather. The sun has been shining as I’ve made several stops at parks near home. The temperature reached the mid-80s Saturday and is expected to do so again today.
I’ll start with the rare bird that came Saturday to Veterans Park in Hamilton, a greater white-fronted goose. When the report that a GWFG — rare in these parts — was at the lake in the park, I headed down the highway Saturday afternoon to see if I could spot it.
Tipped in the parking lot by birders who had just seen it, I used my binoculars to scour the scores of Canada geese in clusters on the far side of the lake. It took me a while, but eventually the goose’s bright orange bill poked out from among the black-and-white Canadas. I had my second lifetime sighting of the greater white-fronted goose. I managed to get a couple of decent photos, too.
I’m pleased that I was able to crop into the greater white-fronted goose and still get a clear shot.
On the walk to find the goose, I heard slapping sounds coming from the lake and looked down to see a double-crested cormorant thrashing a fish in its beak. I blasted away with my camera and caught some peak nature-is-cruel action. After a struggle of roughly a minute and a half, the cormorant swallowed the fish whole.
Imagine what that fish was thinking at this moment, one its last.
If that wasn’t enough excitement, a bald eagle came soaring over the lake and landed in a tree, not far from where the greater white-fronted goose was floating. I had plenty of chances to frame the big bird.
The bald eagle, surveying its domain at Veterans Park.
When I got home, I tackled the chore of removing the screens from our windows, as the window-washing crew is due to come by this week. From our patio, I could hear a red-breasted nuthatch calling. I made a quick recording (its call starts at 0:11) and went inside for my camera. I never did see the bird — only the third of its kind ever observed at our home in almost 10 years — but its visit added to the enjoyment of the weekend.
I may head out again this afternoon, and I have more to report in a second post to come. 🦅
The Jersey Birder 