Party On, Wayne...

Behold! A pristine swampy creek no more than 2 miles from home. What's not to love!? The total and utter lack of bird life..? Ok fair point. But a pretty spot is a pretty spot (just ask anyone with freckles).

My main focus this year will be birding close to home and/or in Wayne County. Gone are the days of 2 a.m. departures and 8 hours in the car to chase a 5 minute vagrant experience. I am responsible now! 

However, I recently perused the eBird records and discovered that the All Time record for Wayne County is a CRAZY 287, nearly 100 more than the next 10-12 people in line, including Butler's Birds. It is far higher than one could hope to catch in sub-decade timeframes. 

Well done, Eric Dean.

Butler's Birds knows when to admit defeat...it just doesn't know when to die, so we'll put that on the back-burner and focus on year lists and, you know, general love of birding, being out in the rough, etc.

so rough...

The struggle for one balancing work and parenthood (and steady birding) in Wayne, NC, is that apart from the Cliffs of the Neuse State Park, and The Goldsboro Wastewater Treatment Plant, there are very few public spaces that have the terrain to support more than your standard backyard species. 

I took for granted, living in Phoenix, the number of parks and dives and greenways that could all yield 30+ species in an hour, in mixed habitats, and existed around my daily commutes. 

Wayne Co. itself is close enough to the coast that is can get occasional vagrants and storm-riders, no doubt, but you need to know where to go and be able to go on a moment's notice to get the kind of outlier numbers needed for #1 slot.

Some of us are still just...how you say..."blinking at the ass-ends of Towhees."

We're in the calm middle of migration now. The wintering sparrows, shorebirds, and waterfowl have largely moved on, while the passerines are just arriving. Pine and Palm Warblers stick around through winter. Northern Parulas and Yellow-throated Warblers are present as early as mid-March. Ovenbirds start hitting in April and add significantly to the woodland soundtrack at places like Cliffs of the Neuse.

CONSP is a good 20 - 25 drive away from anywhere else one needs to be Monday through Friday though, so what can be done with a lunch-break amount of time?

How about birding the washout behind the cemetery behind the Food Lion??

Eh...good for cardinals and sparrows and lots and lots of fake flowers that will take 10,000 years to disintegrate. Not so great for boosting county and year lists, unless you are recording hobo camps.

The birdiest spot in Wayne Co, in terms of species recorded, is the Wastewater Treatment Plant (and its various reservoirs). The tricky thing is civilians can only access on a Monday - Friday basis. Protected public lands with water and wetlands are precious few in the area, so this is a real gem. And it doesn't even smell that bad. But no go on the weekends. Argh.

Spending a couple hours circumnavigating the ponds yielded several dawdling year/county (henceforth: YeCo) birds. All of these will come around again next winter, but listers and non-listers alike agree that a day ending with new recordings, of whatever arbitrary context, is still better than one that does not.

If you are in the area on a weekday and want to find a good spot to see Wood Ducks fly away from you, would recommend GWWTP 10 out of 10. Probably the most consistent place to see these and most any other waterfowl. Waterfowl around here are hyper sensitive and hyper-hunted on the open water most anywhere else. The ones that aren't are not around anymore, at any rate.

As one might expect (and, if one doesn't, one should really heighten one's expectations), Red-wing Blackbirds abound. You hear them before you see them, and you see them all around, so you can imagine how much hearing of them is going on. But wouldn't it be weird, creepy even, to be in such a place and not hear them at all??

Green Heron was a skulky year bird, skulky but expected.

They have special camouflage patterns that render cameras unable to focus

This 28 foot anaconda was less expected. They don't normally migrate this far up from the amazon. 

Savannah Sparrows outnumbered the Chipping, and maybe even the Song. That's a sign, surely, there's something special about a place eh?

There were not noteworthy sightings, nothing unusual for the time and place, but I will be returning to GWWTP soon and regularly.

Weekdays at GWWTP, weekends at CONSP. This will be the way. 

Why do these acronyms make we want to have a prune smoothie?? 

Onwards and upwards, one week at a time. Top 5 Baby.

 

On The Virtues of Boardwalks and The Parula Who Couldn't Be Bothered

It is good to have a home away from home. Who doesn't want to have more homes? A diversity of domiciles? A collection of camps? A bricolage of bases? In this day and age, with Air BnB and relatively cheap travel, Cabin Fever is a preventable disease.

Team Butler's Birds recenty spent a weekend at Chocowinity Bay, where the Pamlico River and its tributaries are leave their offerings to the broken beginnings of the Atlantic. 

The small and tidy Goose Creek State Park is a nifty nearby hotspot, where you can find quarantined graveyards for victims of early 1800s Yellow Fever, pay-phones in the woods, and pretty good birds. It should be said that I have never seen any Geese at this creek, however a Carolina Wren does live in the entrance signage. 

  

GCSP is established as having good birding, and I feel it has the potential/unconfirmed actual of great birding, but I have not yet unlocked it. The site has coastal broadleaf and pine woods, brackish shorelines and inlets, cypress swamps, a little bit of open pasture, and parking lots (nothing pads a trip list better than the Starling/House + Chipping Sparrow/Pigeon/Grackle combo).

Ovenbird is one of the reliable species at GCSP. Fond of woodlands with decent undergrowth, they're vocal and visible around every trailhead it seems.

The brackish coastal portion of the park provides the greatest sense of potential, but also disappointment so far. It seems like a great spot for Rails and Sparrows, but other than an occasional fly-by Tern I have not had any birds of note in this area. 

Partially I blame circumstances; it is the farthest corner of the park and the park doesn't open until 8am (!!!), so I'm not flogging the bushes until 8:30am, but I still can't shake the sense I am doing something wrong with this opportunity. Birders...know the feeling? 

Did you know Purple Martins will repurpose old Osprey nests? You didn't? Me either. Because they don't. They're just perched nearby. Don't jump to conclusions.

Every time I have visited the GCSP I have hustled, even bustled, to the corner of brackish inlets, like a child running downstair at Christmas, eager and excited. Like the same child whose parents pawned their respective hair and watch-bands to buy each other gifts and forgot about me entirely, I am continually disappointed and left without. However it's a quick rebound, because GCSP also provides a constant of satisfaction with its boardwalk. 

During the most recent visit, looking for my customary recovery after my customary disappointment, the boardwalk was particularly good, no Magee Marsh or Anahuac, but excellent to scale. Even without birds, the herps are great and it is surprisingly not buggy, actually less so than the woods.

A buzzy NOPA was yelling into the void right at the start where the lichenous boardwalk runs aground. Parulas are typically gregarious, but after checking me out for a minute, perhaps staring into my bird-lusting soul and sensing the emptiness, things got beyond cozy. 

This NOPA had no filters, no scruples, and no sense of personal space. It became my favorite ever individual NOPA. May the gods have mercy on my soul for the crushing I did to it this day.

                        

Portions of the boardwalk are closely hedged in with thick scrub, while others are shaded over with towering mossy oaks and cypress. In between are openings where storms raged through and snapped everything off at a certain height, leaving many convenient pedestals for swampy birds one might expect. 

Green Herons here are very sensitive, and will flush from their conspicuous perches, loudly and with great complaining, no matter how careful one is. Green Heron in NC is a bird of righteous indignation. I am still used to pond-loving Green Herons in Phoenix, which were largely inured to people and highly crushable. 

Bluebirds and Cardinals also enjoy the open perches, and apparently disregard any notions of compartmentalized aesthetics. They seemed out of place.
For shame generic passerines, you are not of the swamps, but of the yards, lawns, and fences.

 

Possessing both strong aesthetics and habitat integrity, the Prothonotary Warbler is boardwalk perfection.



There was a family group of 3 birds foraging back and forth across swamp. Too good. The GCSP boardwalk is the best place I know of for crushing Proths, and by extension it is the best place for crushing Proths that are crushing moths...or dragonflies, etc.

I was also treated to the thick and resonant percussion of a Pileated trifecta. Upon hearing the unmistakably drumming I waited with uncharacteristic patience until they worked their way closer to the boardwalk. Large, powerful, transitionally ornithischian...Pileated Woodpeckers have a powerful impact on trees and people alike. 

I know PIWOs inhabited/inhabit areas that Ivory-billed could not, as well as similar old swamp. It's still curious to me that Ivory-bills are all but gone entirely and Pileated are doing decently well. Is that because most swamplands now are the result of preservation since the 1960s, after it was too late for IBWOs? Did IBWOs have other reproductive difficulties? Why didn't Teddy Roosevelt save them?

With crushy Warblers, big Woodpeckers, a snapping turtle, anoles, and other goodies, the boardwalk at GCSP is it's own micro hotspot. With the exception of a few migrants, the expected species here is pretty set and limited, but until I can get the skills and strategy up to par for other habitats of potential, it's Boardwalk 4 Tha Win.

The Last of Carolina: A Mélange at Goose Creek SP

Carolina is a great state for birding. It's not California or Texas, nor even Arizona in terms of diversity, but its mountains and its plains and its coast still offer some of the best birding opportunities in the lower 48, especially considering how pretty the surrounding country is (Texas and Arizona cannot always make similar claims). What makes my time birding there even more exciting is that many of the areas where I visit are relatively unestablished on eBird, and as such I can play out my Lewis & Clark naturalist explorer fantasies (the PG-13 ones) with great fulfillment. 

Goose Creek SP is the largest hotspot in my area with about 170 species recorded in total, including a very impressive Shiny Cowbird from 2006. However, in the last 10 years in June, this site had nearer a dozen species recorded. A big site like this? In June? It's a sure thing. There will be many species of bird there, and I can still pretend to be a helpful contributor to citizen science (by confirming what people already would have predicted). For example, nor June records of Common Yellowthroat in the last 10 year? Not any more!!

No June records of two squirrels sitting on a stump in June in the last 10 years? Oh. Well here are some more anyway. Anyhow you get the idea. It's rewarding to explore a place with that burgeoning sense of discovery again, not knowing what all one might find, but knowing one will find a lot, and not just of ticks crawling up the thighs. 

The GC SP is predominantly a deciduous/hard woodland preserve off of the Pamlico River mouth, but this means there's coastal marsh and brackish swamp habitat winding through the preserve. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Prothonotary Warbler is the correct thought, the loud-singing face-melting I-don't-care-how-close-you-are-on-the-boardwalk Warbler. Icepacks and wardrobe changes were in order. 

PRWAs are superlative and typically accommodating, but their accompanying mosquito clouds really make a fellow feel unwelcome. Even taking into consideration the crevace-invading ticks one picks up in the grass, the woodland areas are more comfortable and not without certain quaint, atavistic amenities. 

The telephone is located adjacent to a designated graveyard for people that died from yellow fever in the early 1800s--make of that what you will.
The wooded areas, as one would expect, were teeming with Cardinals, Jays, and Robins, as well as Vireo species, Flycatchers, and Gnatcatchers. Downy Woodpeckers were both present and small, commensurate to expectation, as were Red-headed Woodpeckers correspondingly present and retiring.

It's still foreign, even a bit awkward, to stand on sandy coast and look up into pine trees, but that is much the experience in Carolina on down through Florida. Pines don't naturally grow below 3500 feet or so in Arizona, but I guess it's only appropriate that where they grow at sea level out east, they also bring bird species whose western counterparts are found in similarly higher elevation. 

Yellow-throated Warbler is the sexier, longer-billed, longer-winded counterpart to our pine-loving Grace's Warblers out west. Like Grace's Warblers and unscrupulous junkies, they simply go where the needles are, and out east that doesn't require the same elevation.

YTWA was one of my main targets for the area, knowing that it would be suitable habitat, this would be only the second time I saw the species, and I had no pictures from the first encounter. The 3 different individuals I logged this time were good sports about it, with one of them even singing/buzzing on territory in a mucho gorgeous way.

There were lots of Acadian Flycatchers around, as well as Eastern Wood-Pewees. Neither posed well nor had much good to say, so I shall return the favor.

Poking around the understory did turn up a few other good ones, including some goofy Ovenbirds. These birds were not quite skulk-meisters of the KEWA or SWWA variety, but they were still pretty withdrawn, and sometimes creepy. 

The Goose Creek SP opens up onto the Pamlico River with a small designated swim area, but enough shoreline to walk along the brackish tidal flats a good ways east and west. The offshore waters are littered with crab pods, and the near-shore tree skeletons are littered with Osprey nests, many of which are impressive in size. 

With their reeking cattail marshes, the tidal flats are also good for Rail species, although I arrived too late in the day for much luck beyond truncated audio. Indigo Buntings were good sports, continuing their excellent recent PR campaign with B's Bs. Great-crested Flycatchers continued their suspicious cold-shouldering, so to each their own.

Many of the pine and oak trees in Carolina are littered with Spanish moss, the zany moss that just won't quit. According to the wikipedia machine, Spanish moss--also known as the 'jellyfish plant' and 'Old-Man Winter's pit hair'--is neither lichen nor moss, but a species of bromeliad plant that populates both with tiny, inconspicuous flowers and by colonizing other trees when fragments of its chains drift onto other hosts. Other fun fact: it's often used by Brown-headed Nuthatches as drapery. 

There are a couple of bothersome things about my time birding in Carolina these last couple years. One is that I have still not seen Scarlet Tanager nor American Redstart (both birds that I first logged, inappropriately, in Arizona) and I am bereft of Orioles. A nifty Orchard Oriole helped assuage my disillusionment about these failings a bit, where are those Baltimores at?
I probably need to branch out with more habitats and hotspots, but it's hard to walk away from the diversity of a place like Goose Creek SP. Sometimes birding requires sacrifice. Sometimes it requires hard work. There are dark times ahead.