more on Tiana Beach

Tiana Beach has become the best accessible shore birding spot on Shinnecock Bay, rivaling Pike's Beach and even Cupsogue on the Westhampton (or Westhampton Dunes) stretch of Moriches Bay. Tiana and Pike's have similar origins in hurricane overwash which created sand flats where the birds like to gather. An additional reason for the popularity of both of these spots is that they are traditional Horseshoe Crab nesting spots and the shorebirds (if not the gulls and terns) are avid connoisseurs of Horseshoe Crab eggs.

The Spartina alterniflora is now quite high making visibility difficult in the marshes but there are a few other spots south of the road along the Ponquogue-to-Quogue stretch where they are swales, pools and mud flats with visible birds.

The Tiana sand flats attract a large number of terns with Commons, old and young, living up to their name -- dozens, perhaps hundreds of birds, all in a state of noisy excitement and often taking to the air in those appropriately named tern 'dreads'. Everything takes to the air -- not only the Common Terns but also numbers of Royal Terns, a few Black Skimmers and most of the gathered shorebirds: Short-billed Dowitchers, Willets, Sanderings, Semipalmated Sandpipers (and a few Least), Ruddy Turnstones Semipalmated Plovers, an American Oystercatcher or two and various gulls (including numbers of Laughing Gulls).

Elsewhere on the Dune Road strip, Semipalmated Plovers are present in numbers in all the muddy spots. Also both yellowlegs (Greater and Lesser), various peeps (mostly Sanderlings and Semipalmated Sandpipers) and a few Glossy Ibis.

On Saturday, I'm leading a walk for the Linnaean Society (the second oldest natural history organization in the U.S. at the American Museum of Natural History)
which will start at Cupsogue and is scheduled to make stops at the Pike's Beach overlook and the bay side of Pike's Beach itself. I have now decided that, based on the great activity at Tiana Beach, we'll conclude the day over there.

Eric Salzman