Marty January 3rd, 2009
We got a little surprise yesterday when the JerseyBirds list announced that a Green-tailed Towhee (Papilo chlorurus) had been sighted in Collingswood - right down the road from me! Unfortunately, the poster didn’t know if the owners of the house were willing to let people know where they lived so I had to wait for word before I went over to see this rarity - at least for the east coast. Continue Reading »
Marty January 1st, 2009
Well, it was definitely a slower year of birding this year than last. My job took up a LOT more time, and mother nature stepped in with a long string of bleary weekends during fall migration to limit my time even further. Continue Reading »
Marty December 10th, 2008
One of the ways I treated myself this weekend was to take three wife and my new Nikon D300 out for a birding trip. Sure, it was cold but I was seriously jonesing to get out anyway and the new camera was just more incentive. Continue Reading »
Marty September 2nd, 2008
It was a good weekend - especially since it was 3 days long. Shari and I figured that we would spend at least one day out on the road, and to avoid shore traffic, Sunday seemed the best choice. That being determined, I spent Saturday mowing the lawn, cleaning up the yard, cleaning and fixing the gutters, filling the feeders and some other basic duties around the house. Shari did her part by cleaning up the kitchen, installing new shelves under the sinks and washing the windows. By the time we were done, it felt like a full, satisfying day. We still had other stuff we wanted to get done on Monday - including going to Home Depot to get the materials to redo our door frames and baseboards, but we figured we would do that later. Continue Reading »
Marty July 15th, 2008
After our trip to Cape May, we decided to head to old standby Forsythe NWR in Brigantine to find some shorebirds. We had good success with the insects at Cape May, but not so much with the birds. So, we figured we could get all 3 at Forsythe although we would focus on the birds. Continue Reading »
Marty July 15th, 2008
Last year my wife and I spent a long weekend at Cape May to celebrate our 5th anniversary; this year, we couldn’t do awhile weekend but we wanted to continue the tradition. I wanted to get really early so that we could be there at sunrise; Shari wanted to get up just before sunrise and make it down there early-is in the morning. We compromised and did what she wanted. Continue Reading »
Marty May 30th, 2008
Life ain’t always pretty. While we were driving around Forsythe NWR last weekend, we saw a lot of cool things, enjoyed some sun, smelled some god-awful stuff (”It smells like dead feet” I said, once; later I followed that up with “It smells like rancid toe cheese”. Disgusting, but you know exactly what I mean, don’t you?), and saw some interesting things. One of them was a bit of nature at work in the form of one of the preserves top garbage collectors - the gulls. Continue Reading »
Marty May 29th, 2008
After far too long a time, Shari and I took some time to go birding together this past weekend. We’ve both birded recently, but we haven’t done a joint birding adventure in months, so we were well past-due. And we had a great time - 12 hours of birding at Forsythe NWR in Brigantine, NJ. Continue Reading »
Marty May 11th, 2008
Yesterday was a LONG day of birding - perhaps the longest day I’ve ever had. My buddy Joe is a naturalist and signed on to do a bird count that was happening throughout the day in Delaware. He had a fairly sizable chunk of real estate to cover and asked if I wanted to come along to count the birds in the Dover area, including the shore. I’ve never done something like this, so I figured why the heck not. I hadn’t quite figured on the dedicated effort he was going to put in, but found out quickly when we started making plans for getting together. He had said early - he had meant he wanted to be on-site by 3:30 a.m., which meant a 2:30 departure from his house - which mean a 1 a.m. wake-up for me. Gulp. Continue Reading »
Marty May 7th, 2008
Gray Catbird
Dumetella carolinensis
After working almost 30 days in a row, I desperately needed some ‘me’ time - and with the weather we had yesterday, I took the morning off to go birding at Palmyra Cove. There were some nice warblers about but it was often hard to hear them over the yellow warblers and the 1,000,001 catbirds about. Lucky for them that they are so darn photogenic. Continue Reading »
