One of the things that keeps birders birding is discovery. You go out one morning. Hear an unfamiliar call or stumble upon an incongruous shape in the sky and….
It makes your day. That little interaction. An unexpected gift from birds to you.
This pretty much explains the situation last Saturday. The first full day of summer. Just about the nadir in terms of bird movement.
Northbound birds had all but dried up. Southbound birds were on the cusp of their arrival.
About the hardest thing to discover, and last thing I was thinking about, was discovering a rare breeding bird in precisely a place I bird nearly every day.
But that is precisely what happened.
So there we were. Wife Linda and me. Standing on Turkey Point Road. Squeaking up a few Seaside Sparrows for photography purposes.
Birders always have (at the very least) half an ear cocked toward the Elsewhere and Otherwise. I heard the call that was easily identified and mostly dismissed it.
Caspian Terns - adult (left) and juvenile (right).
It sounded like a Caspian Tern. Our largest Tern. A common fall migrant and less common, but regular spring migrant. But in mid-June? The last Caspian Terns leave New Jersey about mid-May; the first south bound birds don’t commonly reach South Jersey airspace before late July.
Summer sightings are, at best, irregular. The bird has bred several times in New Jersey–along the Atlantic Coast. They are, make that have been, distinctly absent on the Bayshore in June.
“Now what could possibly sound like a Caspian Tern?” a part of my brain mused and it was a pretty short musing. First, because there are very few things that sound like a Caspian Tern (except, perhaps, for a cat protesting the inopportune planting of a foot on its mid-section). Second, because at about this time, Linda announced: “There’s a couple of terns coming in.”
She was wrong. There were seven. Seven terns in a loose group; followed by two more. A total of nine adult Caspian Terns.
Only one bird was calling.
Their course took them over our heads and on to the vicinity of Beaver Dam boat rentals. Their path, followed back, led to about the eastern side of Egg Island Point.
That’s the other, big, arrow-head shaped peninsula projecting into Delaware Bay.
My thoughts? I think it is highly likely that Caspian Terns are breeding or attempting to breed in the marshes of Egg Island Point.
And I think this is sooooo cool.
I think, too, that what is most significant is that in one of the smallest and most heavily birded and studied pieces of real estate in the World (meaning New Jersey) that discoveries are here to be had.
Isn’t that worth getting up in the morning?
Isn’t that better than just heading out to Stone Harbor Point and refinding birds that everybody knows are there?
Isn’t this precisely the thing that got you into birding in the first place? The thrill of discovery?
Well. Get out there and discover. Play a winning hand against the universe by drawing a card nobody even knows is in the deck (much less in your hand).
Caspian Terns breeding on Delaware Bay. What next?
Black-necked Stilt?
Maybe. That, at least, has happened before.