I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! I spent my Christmas on the road, driving down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with my family. After checking the weather conditions along the route, I decided to avoid a possible ice storm along I-95 between Baltimore and Richmond by taking the longer route down through the Delmarva Peninsula. What a great decision, even though the drive took 13 hours. Driving south along the East Coast Highways at this time of year, you should expect to see good numbers of Red-Tailed Hawks, Turkey & Black Vultures, Pigeons, Morning Doves, Robins, Starlings, mixed flocks of "Blackbirds", Crows and assorted Sea Gull species and if you are lucky, something really unexpected. Maybe because it was Christmas, but this trip had some real surprises. It started off with a Common Raven in New Jersey, a juvenile Bald Eagle in Maryland, flocks of Northern Gannets flying next to us while we on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge & Tunnel and the biggest surprise of the day - a Snowy Owl that flew in front of my car while in Delaware. Turned out to be great day of birding along the road.
With one week to go, it will be interesting to see if I will be able to get #1000 for my Life List this year. However, Myrtle Beach does have one great resident target species - Red-cockaded Woodpecker. It is not quite a nemesis bird, but it is a species I've missed on my previous trips down here. Hopefully, I will be able to report later this week that I was successful.
About Me
- mandrake
- My introduction to birding started very early in life, since my grandfather and father raised pigeons. I was facinated by their behavior. One behavoir was how they would cock their heads to look up when some other bird was flying overhead. When they looked up I would look up trying at first just to spot what ever bird they were looking at and then once I had spotted it, trying to identify it. It was a great introduction to nature and ultimately lead me to get a BS in Biology and then a MS in Ecology. About 15 years ago, while I was serving on my townships Environmental Commission, I offered a series Spring Birding Trips, as a way to update the bird list for my townships' Natural Resource inventory. It was so much fun that I have continued to offer five spring Saturday morning trips through the Jackson Township Community Schoolevery year since then. Participants enjoyed these Jackson trips so much that they started asking me to lead additional trips for them. Now in addition to these spring birding trips in Jackson, I lead day trips to several of New Jersey's great birding destinations including Barnegat Light, Brigantine (Edwin B. Forsythe NWR) and Cape May.