Birding the Mud Hole - pelagic birding

My honey and I took a pelagic tour on Saturday with See Life Paulagics out of Belmar, NJ. We were on an 80 foot party fishing boat. This is my second pelagic, my honey's first. It was extremely cold. The wind was out of the north west, and the temps were around 10 degrees Fahrenheit. We ended up about 20 miles due east of Ocean Grove, out of sight of land.

Humpback Whale

Before you read about the birds, I wanted to let the rare reader know that we did see some Humpback Whales, there is a picture to the left. See the small column of water, and the head of the whale breaking the surface. One of the whales provided us a nice show of a tail extended from the water, but of course my camera was not ready at the time. We also had a few dolphins buzz the boat (one is pictured on the left), they seem to like the pressure of the water by the bow of the boat. It was hard to take pictures, my camera lens kept freezing. Even if the camera didn't freeze, the Alcids are pretty shy, and take off when the boat nears them. Many times we'd see little black specks disappearing into the horizon, and someone would say what they were. I only log the birds I actually can see, and only when I am positive they are what they are.

Dolphin

Few of the birders cared about seeing the dolphins or whales. They primarily want to identify as many birds as possible, since they log these with the American Bird Association, and have bragging rights based on their statistics. Their only interest was in seeing birds, and primarily Alcids. The last time I went on a Pelagic, the big discussion on the return trip was how far south the boat went. If we crossed state lines on the ocean, the birds identified impacted the birder's statistics. A Common Loon in NY may do nothing for a birder's statistics, but if we had crossed the imaginary line on the ocean, the Common Loon in NJ now takes on new significance. I carried my GPS in my pocket, and we did cross into NY for a time, but I didn't bother to mention this to the twitchers (read on, all will become clear).

Peopsicles looking for Alcids

I love to get sidetracked when telling a story, so here goes... A few years ago, my honey and I traveled to Trinidad to bird watch. Up until that trip, our birding was a supplementary activity, where we would bird while doing something else. We would always bring our binoculars with us on vacation. On sailing vacations, we've birded many of the British Virgin Islands, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and numerous locations around Long Island Sound. While participating in sailboat races, we've birded Block Island, Nantucket, areas around Kingston, Ontario, and Marblehead. We sea kayaked out of many locations from Maine to southern NJ, birding all the time. Scuba diving in Belize provided many opportunities both near the coast and a little inland. Getaways in Puerto Rico had us birding on all three of their islands. Our trips near home were to Iona, Fyke Preserve, ponds and rivers near home, beaches and inlets, and our backyard bird feeders. I logged a "lifer" last week, an Eastern Towhee. It was at our feeders again this morning.

Trinidad changed everything for us in terms of birding. We stayed at Asa Wright Nature Centre, and had a guide who took us birding every day. Our group had about 8 people, and we birded from sun rise until sunset. At dinner one night, a couple of people who were staying at the center referred to the other guests as "mad twitchers". I had never heard the term before, so I engaged them in conversation to figure this out. A twitcher is someone who counts bird species they see, and are very competitive about it. They can be so competitive that they will hurriedly identify a bird, just for the count. They are sometimes wrong, and some times to get their numbers, twitchers lie. All I know is that many of the birders we encountered on the Trinidad trip had twitching bad... real bad.

After a few days of crazily running around Trinidad to get birds, my honey and I caught ourselves, and realized we were missing so much on the trip. So we bailed on an afternoon trip, and soaked in a spring fed pond on the property. We did our own birding near the center. We spent time together. The other guests would report their great finds from the day's birding, but when the guides use an iPod with bird calls, and an external speaker, it detracts from the process of discovery and identification - at least for us.

When we returned from the trip, our birding optics stayed in the closet for over a year. Seeing over 200 species in a week is great, but the frantic pace and obsessiveness of the other birders turned us off from it all.

It took some time, but we are now back to our quality birding. We take the time to observe the birds, and talk about their characteristics. We observe behavior. I log my birds on eBird, and take pride in knowing that my observations are compiled with many birders around the world, and used by scientists to keep track of bird counts and migrations. My life list has 340 birds on it, which is a pretty respectable number for me. But many people are beyond 700 species, and that takes a lot of birding. More birding than I want to get into at this point of my life.

Here's my eBird report from the Pelagic trip:
Location:     Mud Hole Pelagic
Observation date:     1/22/11
Notes:     Paulagic Tours
Number of species:     10

Long-tailed Duck     6
Red-breasted Merganser     15
Common Loon     3
Great Cormorant     3
Black-legged Kittiwake     1
Bonaparte's Gull     3
Iceland Gull     1
Lesser Black-backed Gull     1
Common Murre     8
Razorbill     6