Sunday, May 17, 2009

Boom or Bust?

Bust. Trust me. We took the Bounder to Cape May on Friday - supposedly the best weekend of spring for migrants. Cape May Observatory even scheduled their "Spring Weekend" for the same weekend. I feel bad for them. Hundreds of people at our usual spots wearing weekend tags, following leaders, seeing basically nothing but mosquitos.

Diane and I drove the Bounder, Barbara drove her truck, Lori and Tara drove the "Schmellow". We all departed from separate points and ended up 3 in a row at the end of Route 55. What a coincidence. We stopped at Belleplain State Forest on our way down.

Oh, did I tell you about our new dog Roxy? She's a half pint Cocoa look-alike - but we didn't really plan it that way. We got her from a horse rescue in Quakertown called Last Chance Ranch. They got her from the Philadelphia Animal Control Shelter (PACS) where she was scheduled to be euthanized in 2 days because they didn't have space for all of the dogs. Sad. But, this isn't a dog blog. She did pretty good on her first birding trip.

Belleplain was not very good but we did get Ovenbird "teacher, teacher, TEACHER, TEACHER!" And Least Flycatcher "chePEEK". And Acadian Flycatcher "pyew". And a water snake.

After we parked the Bounder at the Depot Travel Park, we headed out to Higbee Beach. Tons of mosquitos, Prairie Warblers and Spring Weekend people. Tons of people. We walked the fields without much luck then we hit a little hotspot of Northern Parulas, a Black-throated Blue Warbler, Blackpoll Warbler and Red and White-eyed Vireos. Then it was over. We also saw the most evil looking orange turtle with evil red eyes along the path.

We also went to Cape May Point State Park (we call it the lighthouse) and the Villas WMA. Also busts except for Red-headed Woodpecker which was a life bird for Lori and Tara, and Blue Grosbeaks (M & F) which were lifebirds for Di.

And then it started to rain! It rained all day on Sunday so we packed up and came home early again.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Linda,
My name is Jane and I'm with Dwellable.
I was looking for blogs about Cape May Point to share on our site and I came across your post...If you're open to it, shoot me an email at jane(at)dwellable(dot)com.
Hope to hear from you soon!
Jane