April 20, 2018
Coffee of the Day: Ethiopian Harrar
Bird of the Day: peregrine falcon
Weird Wrack Item of the Week: all the usual stuff, nothing particularly weird
Invisi-bird Status: Refuge: 26 pairs, 10 loners, 0 nests. Sandy Point: 6 pairs, 0 nests. Town Beach: 3 pairs, 0 nests. Number actually seen by me: 2 at Sandy Point.
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| View from the Lot 1 Boardwalk |
I was not on the schedule for today so I took advantage of the free time to do some birding. Not having seen a piping plover yet this season was getting to me, so I headed down to Sandy Point where they're fairly visible. Sure enough, I heard the peep-lo call and saw two of them in flight. Ran into another plover warden (also not on duty today but in search of his first sight of them this year also) and we compared notes on how little appropriate nesting habitat was left on the northern end of the refuge after the winter.
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| Driftwood and Beach Grass at Sandy Point |
I took my time birding along the road back to the entrance from Sandy Point. I saw a number of turkeys, some of them in the middle of the road, a lone northern flicker, a bunch of turkey vultures and several northern harriers, but the best sighting was peregrine falcon over the dunes. Raptor migration is definitely underway. There was a group of hawk watchers at Lot. They told me they'd seen a lot of northern harriers including a "gray ghost" (the adult male northern harrier). I was disappointed to have missed that one because that's an impressive sight.
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| Rocks in the Dunes at Sandy Point |
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