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The Brown Booby is a bird that helps explain why birders don’t always want to share what they are doing with non-birders.  Explaining to people that the main goal you have for a visit to Cape May is seeing a Brown Booby and you will, at the least, get an odd look.  Others will crack [...]

It is early, pre-dawn, and the sky is just lightening in the east when you arrive.  You park your car, gather your optical equipment, take a last gulp of glorious coffee, and get out of your car.  The whole area is alive with movement and chip notes but you can’t take the time to figure [...]

On a recent visit to Cape May Point State Park in search of an elusive Purple Gallinule I did not find my quarry but I did find quite a few photogenic birds.  One of them or, rather, several of them, were Gadwall – a pile of ducklings with their mother.  I am used to seeing [...]

Joining this story a bit late?  Click here for part one.  Click here for part two. … The delicious mojito that I gulped down with lunch had sufficiently numbed my poor, sore butt enough that getting back on the bike caused no pain.  We three insane Swarovski Triathlon Hawks made our way back through downtown [...]

Joining this story a post late?  Click here to read part 1. After our slow start to the day we were amazed when, while waiting for Clay’s flat tire to be repaired, Brian counted up our list and realized we had tallied 94 species.  We had thought we were doing much, much worse than that and our [...]

Higbee Beach.  The 2nd Avenue Jetty.  The Beanery.  The Meadows.  Hidden Valley.  The Hawkwatch Platform.  Any birder who has ever visited Cape May and many who have not will recognize these place names that are iconic in the birding world.  All of them were on the route of the Triathlon Hawks, our Swarovski Optik-sponsored team [...]

When I wrote my last post about NJ birding, I mentioned that there were two factors that make NJ a great birding spot: its geographic location and the different habitats found in a small state. There is a third factor that I’d like to throw into the mix — NJ has an unusually high number of [...]

Back a couple of weekends ago when Daisy and I and our friends Mike and Lena were in Cape May Daisy and I snuck off Sunday morning for a walk around the Nature Conservancy’s Cape May Migratory Bird Refuge.  We enjoyed the common birds around the refuge, which included a couple of different pairs of [...]

While I was in Cape May this past weekend I came across a trio of Fish Crows, two of which quickly took off and flew a short distance away from me.  The third held its ground and proceeded to pick through sticks, bark, and other objects on the ground, seemingly trying to decide if any [...]

A couple of weeks ago, when Daisy asked if I wanted to go away for the last weekend of April, and suggested Cape Cod or Cape May, well, as a birder, I had no choice but to say “Why yes I would like like to go away for the last weekend of April. Let’s go [...]

As I mentioned earlier, my favorite part of Cape May Autumn Weekend was undoubtedly meeting so many fantastic birders. I suspect this would have been the case even if the weather wasn’t so rotten! The Birds and Beers soirée on Friday night was quite possibly the social event of the season or more likely just [...]

Now that summer is officially over, we can turn our attention to affairs of fall. Few events on the North American birding calendar are more autumnal than Cape May Autumn Weekend. Cape May in New Jersey is one of the magnetic poles of East Coast avian observations, a vortex that seems to exert an irresistible [...]