It's been a busy weekend birding. We drove to Seven Presidents Park in Long Branch, NJ and I had my first life bird of the year-Red Crossbills
We drove around the northern Jersey shore area in search of the Pacific Loon that was being seen at the Shark River Inlet in Belmar, NJ. We had no luck finding the loon. We then drove over to the Belmar Marina. There were thousands of ducks, geese and gulls in the water which sort of saved the rest of the day for us. The one bird that really caught our eye was this Turkey Vulture enjoying his lunch. Which reminded us, we were pretty hungry also.
The Turkey Vulture had better luck finding a meal in Belmar than we did. The lunch counter in the marina building was closed and we couldn't find a place on Main Street. We hopped back into the car...
and drove down to Sandy Hook. On the road we found a Perkins. It was food and that was about all. It served it's purpose to provide calories so I wouldn't pass out. Sandy Hook wasn't very productive and it was getting dark-we called it a day.
This morning Larry was one of the volunteers participating in the Official NYS Waterfowl Count. His mission was to count all the waterfowl in Prospect Park. I tagged along for the birding.
Lucky for Larry it wasn't the official gull count. He would of had a much more difficult time.
Those aren't snowballs on the frozen lake at Prospect Park, those are gulls. The ducks, geese and swans were much easier to find.
They weren't even disturbed when we walked up to them.
Even the nasty Swans cooperated.
Check out the toes on the American Coot.
The entire count took 45 minutes, because there were only 3 places where the water wasn't frozen. We stopped by the feeders on the way to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens where we were going to have lunch.
There was a beautiful House Finch at one of the feeders along with a Chickadee.
On the path to the Audubon Center, we checked out the tree that a pair of Racoons have been using as a den.
At the Audubon Center, there were 3 or 4 Cardinals, one posed for me.
Every birding weekend has it's theme color, this weekend's was red.
We went to the Botanical Gardens, had lunch and coffee, walked around and went home. We walked almost 6 miles in the cold and I was exhausted. I couldn't keep my eyes open and napped the afternoon away.
Dinner tonight was really easy. The sweet and sour cabbage was already prepared all I added was chopped meat to it.
Super duper lazy golumpki.
Tomorrow if it's not windy, we are going to go to Central Park, which means Indian food for lunch and next to no dinner.
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