Day 211: July 29th – Summer sanderlings

Partly sunny, low 80s, breezy

       I got out to the beach before the throngs this morning.  Sunday mornings on Long Beach Island on a sunny day can be a real experience.  For now the birds have the run of the beach, but that will change as the morning wears on.  The tide is out and the jetty in front of the unit we are renting is exposed.  I was hoping for some “peeps” (little sandpipers) to be picking among the seaweed on the rocks, but the only sandpipers present were their larger cousins, the Sanderlings.

       Sanderlings are by far the most common sandpiper along the Jersey shore during the summer months. If you visit the shore this summer, you’ll find these little guys chasing the waves back and forth looking for small crabs and other invertebrates. 

       For the most part, these that I photographed this morning are adult birds which are in route to their wintering grounds down south.  Who knows?  We may actually find these same birds wintering with us down in Florida in January!  Our journey is relatively short compared to theirs, however.  Our trip from New York to Florida is about 1100 miles.  The breeding grounds of these birds ranges from the Canadian arctic regions to Greenland and their trip south may be up to 6000 miles!

       It’s interesting to see the birds in their breeding plumage.  This will be changing as the seasons wear on, and they will change their dark brown coats for a much lighter almost gray plumage.  Note the two photos below.  One was taken this morning along the beach here in Jersey while the second is from this past winter down in Florida.

Wintering sanderling, New Smyrna Beach, FL 

Summer sanderling, Long Beach Island, NJ

         The other bird of note this morning was the Greater Black-backed gull, our largest gull.  While often seen acting like a typical gull and scavenging food scraps as well as dead marine organisms washed up onto shore, this bird is big enough and mean enough to act like a predator and attack and kill prey.  The Greater version of this bird is what we generally see here on the east coast, but if one appears on the scene with yellow legs, we know we have the rarer Lesser black-backed gull.  We’ll continue to keep and eye out for this rarity for the next couple of weeks.