I know i've asked this before, but is anyone here into birding? I have tuesday off, and while i know quite a few good birding places, i was wondering if anybody here had a good (and relatively less well-known) spot that i could hit in the barrens or on the coast.
If you are into raptors ( the only group of birds at which I consider myself reasonably proficient, having been a life-long falconer and rehabilitator of threatened / endangered raptors) I always thought it interesting that the casual birders I knew who used to go birding along the braes of Barnegat Bay would get into arguments about whether peregrine falcons or merlins (pigeon hawks) were more prevalent on a given day during migration. It boiled down as to whether they were out on the barrier beaches (where peregrines ruled the roost - so to speak - and merlins were rare to non-existant) or on the mainland side where the reverse obtained.
One late afternoon in November in the early 60's near Batsto I saw a mature golden eagle perched and scanning an open area - perhaps a recovering burn, and a few minutes later about 300 yards away, a first-year immature bald eagle on a snag overlooking the Mullica. It was a great opportunity to show my fiancee the differences between those two often-confused birds. That was the only definite sighting I've ever made of a golden in the PBs; I've thought that a few others might have been goldens, but the sighting conditions were less-than-optimal and I have to admit that they may have been immy balds. I've heard that it's not unusual for the more persistent birders at Cape May to see a few goldens en passant every fall.
Dave
