North Meets South at Sandy Hook

There are few more beautiful places on the Jersey shore than Sandy Hook, that slender spit of land that pokes up from Monmouth County into the mouth of New York Harbor.

Signaled from afar by the twin lights of Navesink, the Hook and its estuaries, salt marshes, and ponds are one of the best birding sites around, and my fond memories of the place over the years range from my “lifer” Gyrfalcon to such disparate “state birds” as Sandwich Tern and Black-legged Kittiwake.

Friday was a beautiful–if breezy–day to be out. And though the wind seemed to depress bird activity in the tangled woods and thickets, the sea and the sky brought us two nice surprises, one from the north, one from the southwest.

The very tip of the Hook, reached on the sandy Fisherman’s Trail, is often the place to look for gulls. This time I couldn’t find anything but “the big three”–Great Black-backed, Herring, and Ring-billed Gulls–but the water in front of them hosted nice Red-throated Loons (far more abundant at most coastal New Jersey localities than Common Loon)

and, a pleasant surprise even in what is obviously an “invasion” winter for the species, eight Common Eiders.

Two of the birds were white-breasted immature males, the other six brown birds like these (and so presumably females). With flocks of up to 200 (two hundred!) individuals being reported from farther south on the shore, the presence of this little band shouldn’t have been a surprise, I suppose, but it was balm to the eyes of an adoptive Arizona.

Those balmed eyes opened wide a few minutes later when three small swallows appeared low in the sky to our south. They kept coming, closer and closer, and one of them flew right past at eye level: Cave Swallows! They continued north and out of sight, probably into New York waters.

When I first started birding New Jersey, a quarter of a century ago, a sighting of Cave Swallow anywhere, at any season, would have raised eyebrows, maybe even hackles. But for whatever reason, this species now engages in regular November peregrinations to the north and east, and it’s only a matter of time before the first one makes landfall in Iceland–where it will probably fly over the heads of Common Eiders once again.