by Ian Lynch

It is 1:45 PM on Friday, I’m sitting in the passenger seat listening to a Grateful Dead concert from the year before I graduated from High School and trying to concentrate on blogging instead of birding!  No, I haven’t given up the fight, Ken and I are headed north to Carl’s house to eat, sleep and start the Big Day.  We’ll have lots of discussion between now and whatever time we steal a nap, then we will have even more when we finally gather the team to start birding at midnight.  The night hours do hold a decent number of species, but it is much slower than most of the rest of the day, so we will have time to discuss strategy and routing choices.  We have divided up the scouting into discreet sections so for the most part the important decisions in any area are made by the team member who scouted the area.  For me that means rolling around a half dozen possibilities in my head including a number of “emergency exits” if time and/or species demand evasive action. 

The southernmost scouts on all the teams share the same plight, we have no control over how much time we will be dealt, we simply have to play the cards we are given.  I’m actually starting to relish the role, it requires a cool head to face the challenge and fanatical drive to overcome.  Last year I said, “Just get me to Millville Airport by 1:00.”  This year I’m willing to take 2:00 for a start time if the team scouting “the middle” can convince us to go for it and try for a half dozen or so species in Salem County.  Since I’m not sure that any of them are convinced that we should attempt it I doubt that we will be there this year.  There is also the problem that the weather (as well as the scouting reports from the north) seem to indicate that we may need more time up there this year.  In any case, I’m ready to find my inner type A personality and take on the southern challenge.

This year’s hotspot is definitely Heislerville.  Lots of teams will find themselves spending an hour there picking up most of the shorebirds and good number of ducks.  That is, of course, as long as the refilling of the impoundment at Matt’s Landing doesn’t completely obliterate the shorebird habitat.  I’m planning a coastal-north-to-south-first route for Cape May this year.  We’ll see how well we do picking up species early on the route so we can buy time to spend looking at the ocean in Cape May Point, before blasting north to Brigantine where we will watch the sun go down.  Last night’s swap meet provided some tantalizing information as did a couple of phone calls and conversations in the field.  Unfortunately, this can serve to overwhelm, so I’m trying to stick to finding all the birds we can in locations where I can expect to connect the dots in the time provided.  Today’s eleventh-hour scouting finally turned up a Piping Plover and almost a nest.  The reason for the “almost” is that I was watching NJ Wildlife staff scouring the beach for a nest where they presumably will erect an exclosure.  This was at Stone Harbor Point, where I also got a tip that there has been an occasional Gull-billed Tern.

The final (and perhaps best) find of the day was something we are hoping will be good for our “mojo.”  The Wetlands Institute gift shop sells stuffed animal birds that sing their song when you squeeze them.  So now riding proudly on the dash of the van is a stuffed Common Yellowthroat that sings “witchity, witchity, witchity” when squeezed! 

by Ian Lynch

As usual, we have had a good number of valuable encounters with other scouting teams.  The exchange of information and helpful hints has been steady.  We even had the pleasure of enjoying the hospitality of WSB staff Sheila Lego and Marleen Murgitroyde on Tuesday night at a dinner they hosted for WSB participants.  The unscheduled entertainment for the evening was a pair of teammates from one of the top teams who put me in mind of Penn and Teller: one regaled us with fantastic stories while the other performed magic (in this case near perfect imitations of bird songs, including Winter Wren).  Thankfully there was still food left when Ken and I arrived, since we were late.  It would be nice if the cause were a matter of not being able to leave the field because of all the birds we were finding, but the truth is that we couldn’t leave the field because our technology drained the van battery and we couldn’t get it to start.  Thankfully, Ken got enough signal on his cell phone to call AAA, but they couldn’t get there for almost two hours.  A dozen or so people stopped to help, but none had cables.  Eventually, one Good Samaritan went home and came back with cables and gave us a jump.  We re-learned a lesson we had thought we already knew and now have cables in the van.

One of the members of last year’s winning team, Bert of the Lagerhead Shrikes, has become something of a hero to Ken and me for his creative use of technology.   One thing he has done is to take pictures of birds and their locations in the field so he can mark them up and show him to his teammates, thus helping the team to shave off valuable seconds during the competition.  We so liked the idea that we’ve added his name as a verb to our birding lexicon.  After locating the Yellow-crowned Night Herons at their usual roost in Avalon, I decided to snap a picture so that I could “bert” them.  You can see the result posted here.  We did the same with the Red-headed Woodpeckers.

by Ian Lynch

The frustration of not being on territory looking at birds last week has now been replaced by total immersion scouting.  I left Massachusetts late on Sunday and drove through the night getting to Witchity HQ South around 3:30 AM; sleep deprivation being a key element of World Series conditioning.  I unloaded my stuff into cabin 18 at Avalon Campground, conveniently left open by Marleen and the friendly staff here.  Then before getting some sleep I set up our feeding station: a hummingbird feeder, a dish of mixed seed and a block of suet.  The reason for choosing this campground was the prior appearance of Red-headed Woodpeckers, so this set-up was an ambitious attempt to bait this bird for Saturday.  I went to bed with bird sounds playing on a loop on my laptop ready for the great adventure to begin.

When I got up in the morning (OK, so it was only a few hours later) the first bird sound I heard was a repeated buzzy call that immediately put me in mind of the eagerly anticipated woodpecker.  Just as I was beginning to think that the week had started with a bang, I realized that I was listening to a Great Crested Flycatcher. As it turns out, while we are happily domesticated in our cozy cabin, we picked the wrong campgrounds this year as a very cooperative pair of Red-headed Woodpeckers is setting up house a few miles up the road at another campground.

Scouting has been going rather well.  Our driver, my brother Ken, joined me in the south on Monday afternoon.  Carl spent the weekend camping up north, went to work for two days and is now again camped out in the northern woods.  Dave has been making wild overnight forays (often starting at 2 AM) north from his home near Princeton.  And Chris (aka Crew Member #6) has taken special missions to Brigantine, National Park, and Salem County.  The good news is that we have more scouting power this year than ever before.  The bad news is that we will have no excuses!