Oystercatchers, Ruddy Turnstones, Ospreys, Semipalmated and Black-bellied Plovers, and Sanderlings
A trip to the shore rarely disappoints and a couple of days ago I had a very windy but beautiful visit to the Audubon Society in Milford. First off were the beautiful Purple Martins in the parking lot itself – still working on home improvement!
What a gorgeous color in the right light!
On the way to the actual beach, there were two Ospreys hovering high in the sky looking quite literally like little postage stamps in the air, not moving at all, just facing into the wind and staying still.
The beach seemed very quiet for a low tide with hardly any gulls even, but there were quite a few Oystercatchers including a couple of them sitting on eggs. We met up with one of the staff people who was checking up on the brooding birds. He told us that the foxes who live in the dunes come early in the mornings and steal the eggs from the Oystercatchers. Sadly, rarely do any of the young reach adulthood there! I wondered why the oystercatchers, with their long bills, don’t put up a fight but apparently their beaks aren’t sharp and, although the birds appear to be quite large, they are actually mostly fluff and could never win against the sharp teeth of the fox.
Around the bend we saw the one hatched clutch of 3 Piping Plover chicks running around. We just sat down on the beach and watched them for quite a while. Adorable! They are featured in a separate post.
I stuck around for another couple of hours. Near the Purple Martins there were also 3 Yellow-crowned Night Herons. They had been huddling together when I first arrived but now they were out foraging.
There are 3 Osprey nests in the area. I watched the “changing of the guard” at the nearest nest but the heat distortion ruined the photographs. However out on the ocean side again, I saw that dinner was arriving.
When I returned to the ocean-side beach, a bird flew in that I hadn’t seen before. For a moment I thought it was a lapwing, but they aren’t found in New England. I asked a passerby if she knew what it was and she identified it as a Black-bellied Plover, apparently a near relative of the lapwings. (Maybe I am becoming a birder after all!) Anyway, it’s a cool bird and this one was in its mating regalia.
Other birds that are easy to miss except when they all fly off at once are the cute little Sanderlings and Semipalmated Plovers.
Here is an American Black Duck sporting the otherwise hidden beautiful blue streak on his wing.
The rest of the walk was more of the same from my earlier walk out to the point. A beautiful day at the beach, in the sun, watching birds! And then I was off to see the Great Blue Heron rookery in Hamden that a fellow traveler had told me about.