At the Wednesday evening team
meeting, the offer was extended for people to join Bracken (local staff member)
on Thursday morning with some breeding bird point counts in Maryland. I
initially baulked at the 4am start time but the pull of warblers was just too
strong and I soon capitulated! So, well before dawn on Thursday I was sleepily
getting into a car with Bracken and Rob. We headed off and before 5am found
ourselves in a Wawa’s, an American coffee shop chain. Needing a sugar rush to
wake me up, I decided to take my life into my own hands and order a salted
caramel hot chocolate. Within a couple of sips, I was bouncing off the walls of
the car! I think it is quite possible that that one drink (I got the smallest
possible) contained my entire daily calorific allowance!
The point counts are part of the
US survey methodology for potential wind farm sites (another reason I was
interested). The site is at the very early stages of survey and the potential
location is not yet finalised so a 10 mile by 5 mile survey area is being
covered. Sixteen point counts have been chosen at random across the area and
surveys involve standing at the points for five minutes and recording all birds
seen or heard. The counts are undertaken weekly between April and July.
Additionally, migration surveys are carried out in the autumn. Presumably, more
robust surveys are then undertaken when the location of the wind farm has been
ascertained (we did suspect that the met mast at one location may be a clue as
to the current favourite spot!).
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| Red-bellied woodpecker |
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| American Robin with nest material |
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| Red-wing blackbird nest |
After the surveys were finished,
Bracken called in to Kevin to find out what was happening. The answer was a
familiar one – still no knot in the harbour, therefore, not a lot happening.
With this in mind, we headed back towards Delaware and took the opportunity to
do a little birding in the management reserve area of Little Creek. It was a
beautiful morning and the birds were singing their little hearts out and
showing nicely. In total, I added twelve new species to my American bird list
(not that I am a lister of course!) including black and white warbler,
bay-breasted warbler, chestnut-sided warbler, magnolia warbler and Canada
warbler. We also nearly trod on a plethora of common toad and found a very cool box turtle! As if that wasn’t special enough, we quickly popped into the St Jones
Reserve on the way past for Bracken to show us the black vulture chicks nesting
at the bottom of a hollow tree. The only way to describe them is that they were
so ugly, they were cute! The only problem with wandering through woodlands,
however, is the nasty, horrible ticks - I found four of them crawling on me
when I got back to the house.
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| Common toad |
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| Box turtle |
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| Black vulture chicks |
Later that afternoon, a small
team of us went colour ring re-sighting at Port Mahon. It was blisteringly hot
and the biting flies were evil. Re-sighting at Port Mahon is tricky as the
birds are amongst rocks which keep hiding their legs. The beach is also a stone’s
throw away from the road and the birds there can be easily disturbed by passing
traffic. Despite this, we managed to get a few flags to contribute to the
database.
Friday morning woke up bright and
sunny and proceeded to be a gorgeous, stiflingly hot day. The sense of déjà vu was
beginning to wear thin as, again, the early morning recce team found few knot
in Mispillion Harbour. The planned knot catch on Back Beach was postponed once
again so I spent a bit of time out on Slaughter Beach watching the birds out
there. They were mostly semi-palmated sandpipers and dunlin with a few
turnstones thrown in. A few of the birds had flags on but they were too far
away to see and very jumpy when I got too close.
When the tide was at the
appropriate state, we headed to Port Mahon for another attempted turnstone catch.
One net was quickly set and we retreated to wait for the birds to return. I was
lucky enough to be on the firing box for the catch and was given a briefing by
Kevin before he settled down to watch the catching area. As the catch potential
intensified, the instruction was given to ‘arm the box’. Next came the
instruction to ‘connect the cable’, followed by ‘switch in the net’. At this
point, the nerves started to hit hard. All I had to do was to press the red
button but the pressure to not mess up the catch weighed heavy. When the
countdown began, I concentrated hard on the button (remembering not to be
distracted by the birds), waited for the instruction to ‘fire’ and plunged my
thumb into the button. I was very relieved to hear a resounding ‘boom’ and to
see the net go flying over some birds.
The lift was a very wet one but
the birds were soon safely in boxes and back at base camp. Before long the
keeping cages were full of fifty turnstone and two processing teams were busy
flagging, ringing and processing birds. I scribed for this catch which was
interesting due to the differences in the British and American terminology and
coding systems. It was a nice, efficient catch, including our first re-traps of
the season, which helped to boost the current, somewhat low (so far) ringing
totals.
After a bit of downtime at the house,
I joined the team heading into Mispillion Harbour to re-sight. We weren’t
expecting much, as a mid-afternoon recce hadn’t seen many birds out there. Our
pessimism was, however, totally unfounded and we were treated to Back Beach looking
far more like how I remembered it from last year. Unfortunately, most of the
birds were dunlin but there were about 400 – 500 knot, a few turnstone, a few
semis and dowitchers and the odd sanderling. It was our first opportunity to
get a decent number of knot re-sightings and I managed to get forty-two flags
into the notebook. By 7pm it was beginning to get a bit chilly and the birds
were getting a little flighty which gave us fabulous views of the birds in
flight. There can be few views more spectacular as the sun is beginning to set
than the sight of twenty thousand birds flying around in front of you!
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| Carpet of waders in front of the re-sighting boat |
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| Swarms of birds on Back Beach |
On Saturday, Rob, Guy and I skived
off from re-sighting and accepted an invitation to join the Sussex County Bird
Club / Delaware Audubon on a birding trip to the Great Cyprus Swamp in the
south west of Delaware State. The area is a privately owned habitat that is managed
for deer. It has previously been drained but is currently undergoing management
work to try to restore the habitat to its former glory. This includes removing
the trees (sweet gums / tulip poplars) that are colonising the drier areas and re-wetting
the woodland. The trees being removed are being ring-barked, leaving large numbers
of ‘snags’. The by-product of this is a large increase in the number of
red-headed woodpeckers. We managed to see ten! The trip generated an additional
six new species for me including a cracking male American redstart, yellow-throated
warbler, Louisiana water thrush and wild turkey. We also managed to see a black
rat snake hassling ovenbirds (some very worried looking adults trying to protect
their chicks) and tiger swallowtail butterflies (both the yellow and
the black morphs) – stunning!!! Unfortunately, woodland birding is not that
conducive to photography, particularly as the birds were being especially
secretive and difficult to see, so there is no photographic evidence of any of the
new species.
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| Eastern kingbird |
When we returned to Slaughter Beach
we diverted straight to the DuPont Nature Centre to help out at the Peace, Love
and Horseshoe Crabs event. This involved showing the few visitors that were
left to see what few birds we could find for them at high tide. Unfortunately,
the day was nothing like yesterday and was instead, grey and cold and by the
time the crew went into Mispillion Harbour, it was also pretty damp. I was
quite glad I wasn’t on the trip that evening! I instead stayed at the house and
helped to welcome the new intake of Brits (Lucy, Dave and Justin) who arrived
to join the seven of us already here.
So, we are still awaiting the
arrival of the knot in any large numbers but we are still hopeful…
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