A Snowy End to the Year

I returned from my self-imposed Bosnian exile in late December to celebrate the holidays with my friends and family for a couple weeks. My first port of call in the US was Delaware where I would be spending Christmas at my aunt and uncle’s house in Newark. My ability to go birding more frequently due to access to a car made me resolved to get out birding at least once while I was in the state.

The opportunity presented itself when I got a day free of family time and was able to arrange to meet Delaware young birder Jerald Reb for a morning of birding around Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge (NWR).

Delaware has two famous NWRs named after hooks (geographical hooks that is): Prime and Bombay. Bombay Hook NWR I have visited a number of times but I had never driven far enough south to visit Prime Hook. Besides the appeal of a novel site to bird, there were also reports of a continuing snowy owl at Prime Hook, a species I very much wanted to catch up with.

My 5 am wakeup came far too early and I lethargically drove out of my family’s driveway and made my first stop of the day, a roadside Wawa, that incredible Midatlantic institution that I have spent most of my life deprived of. Crunching on a made-to-order biscuit and cheese quesadilla and sipping the delicious nectar that is a Wawa smoothie, I made my way down the empty interstate.

Eventually, after getting lost in labyrinthine American back roads, I pulled up next to Jerald at a spot supposedly good for long-eared owl. The qualifying word “supposedly” is the important one in that sentence as we dipped on the owls who stubbornly refused to even give a single toot in response to Jerald’s imitations.

We also dipped on the long-eared’s cousin the short-eared owl, although eastern screech and a couple great horned owls saved the pre-dawn hours from being a completely pointless endeavor of standing in place and freezing.

By the time the sun rose over the coastal marsh in which we found ourselves, big skeins of snow geese had begun to appear, shimmering as their white bodies flashed in the light of the young day. This whetted my appetite enough to want to go see some waterfowl so we headed to Fowler Beach Road in Prime Hook to do just that.

The wind proved my worst enemy as we walked down the entrance road to the beach. I had foolishly left my windbreaking outer shell (usually indispensable to my winter birding) in Sarajevo as the predictable side affect of deciding to rush through all my packing at 1 am the morning of my flight. Now I was paying the price, shivering bitterly and cursing my stupidity through clenched teeth. Thankfully, there were enough birds around to make me forget all about the cold.

Masses of snow geese were bobbing on the water of Delaware Bay when we arrived at the beach and a mixed flock of snow buntings and horned larks gave mumbled call notes as they moved around the sand.

Masses of snow geese irrupt off the water

However, our attention was soon turned to the hoard of telephoto lenses assembled just down the beach: we seemed to have found our snowy owl.

And we had indeed, arriving to find the owl nonchalantly perched on a fence post. Once again the golden rule of rarity chasing had proved valuable: always look for the crowd of scopes and cameras.

Snowy Owl

It was a beautiful bird but there’s only so long you can stay amongst such a crowd of rabid snowy owl photographers so we eventually ensconced to the shore to look for waterfowl. Besides the massive raft of snow geese, not much was present, although a small flock of surf scoters was well welcomed.

Fowler’s beach wasn’t done turning up gems however as we were also able to locate a couple of Lapland longspurs amongst the snow bunting flock. As we were preparing to head back to the cars, the snowy owl decided to take flight and alight on the fence adjacent to us. It was stunning of course to see the owl in flight, but perhaps the more impressive (and definitely more comical) sight was the parade of tripods and camera-toting humans which was hustling down the beach to catch up with the bird. No sooner had they gotten back into position then the bird took flight again, this time landing on the fence post at the start of the beach entrance road! Not wanting to be one of those people who flush a snowy owl, we were forced to abort our attempted departure from the beach and settled down to watch the owl again (as the tripod stampede caught up and settled in around us).

Eventually the owl flew again and we were free to return to our cars. At this point I bid goodbye to Jerald who had to head home and headed farther south to bird some coastal wetland sites. These were somewhat slower than I had hoped but a good assortment of dabbling ducks as well as a large group of American avocets were present. The real highlight however was a stunning, continuing dark-morph rough-legged hawk which I got to watch hunting over the marshes.

Rough-legged Hawk

My final rare sighting of the day came as I was driving back to Newark and just about to exit the freeway for my second Wawa stop. I spotted something which appeared to me to be a gull along the roadside. As I drove closer, it flushed up and revealed itself to be a cattle egret! An out of season rarity and a good way to wrap up an excellent morning and my first ABA birding outing in a while.