water birds of marsh & creek

Another beautiful morning with a late sunrise and a low tide that enabled me to get well into the marsh. Amazingly enough, at exactly the same spot as yesterday's dowitcher, a seemingly identical, good-sized, long-billed shorebird jumped up and flew to the other side of the open pond in the middle of the marsh. Another dowitcher? No, this bird lacked the white lozenge on the back and it flew up with a short, harsh, toneless scraping sound. Not a dowitcher but a Wilson's Snipe, an amazingly similar bird in the same spot. And the first Wilson's Snipe of the year for me.

But that wasn't all. Almost immediately, just a few steps away, a similarly sized bird (bigger body, shorter bill) flew up and low into the dense vegetation. A medium-sized rail -- Virginia Rail again, no doubt.

Water birds continued to dominate the day. A Wood Duck pair, male and female, were in the pond just about where four of these gorgeous creatures dropped in yesterday. And Royal Terns continued to hold the creek. These southern birds (their nearest nesting grounds are usually listed as Maryland although there may be a few birds breeding further north) come to Long Island is a post-breeding dispersal as early as mid-May and their numbers only seem to increase in the fall.

Where oh where did the siskins go? As several readers have pointed out, Shai Mitra saw something around 20,000 Pine Siskins moving west along the barrier beach (he was at Robert Moses State Park at the western end of Fire Island). Obviously 'our' siskins could not resist joining up with the crowd moving on; not a single one is left after a visit (probably by several hundred birds) of more than three weeks.

Eric Salzman