To the uninitiated, it might seem that winter would be the slow season for birding. The birds have flown south; not much to see around here.
But for many birds, this is the south. For example, there are more waterfowl in North Carolina in winter than any other time of year. This and the fact that the weeks following the holidays are less busy for most of us make this a good time for birding.
The Audubon Society of Forsyth County has two long weekend field trips each year. The first was over the Martin Luther King holiday. This year, we returned to a favorite destination, Beaufort, N.C. The Beaufort area is great for birding. It has a variety of habitats that attract many kinds of birds. Sandy beaches, inlets, marshes, forests, rivers and ponds lure waterfowl, seabirds, sparrows, shorebirds, raptors and egrets.
On the way to Carteret County, we stopped in Goldsboro for a brief visit to a popular, if odd, bird magnet: the wastewater treatment plant. Settling ponds generate lots of insects and other invertebrates that birds feed on, and we found lots of Bonaparte’s gulls, Northern shovelers, ruddy ducks and coots.
Just south of New Bern, we stopped at Lilliput Pond, where hundreds of ducks were gathered. American wigeons, hooded mergansers and ring-necked ducks were abundant, and a single tundra swan capped off the gathering of waterfowl.
On Saturday morning, because there were 30 of us, we needed to split up. Birds take offense when too many people try to admire them.
My team started at the Town Creek marina in Beaufort, where we found gulls galore: herring, laughing, greater black-backed and ring-billed. As we pulled into a gravel parking, we were treated to a surprise reception — a colony of 20 or more black-crowned night herons roosting in the trees a few feet away.
Next stop was Calico Creek in Morehead City. The city has constructed boardwalks along this tidal creek. It attracts green-winged teal, long-billed shorebirds called dowitchers, and highly secretive clapper rails and soras.
We worked our way to where the North River flows into marshes and on to Back Bay, protected from the open sea by the Outer Banks and Cape Lookout National Seashore. A flock of 100 marbled godwits, one of our largest shorebirds, probed a sandbar for their version of seafood.
The following morning we were led onto the Rachel Carson North Carolina National Estuarine Research Reserve by expert birder John Fussell, author of “A Birder’s Guide to Coastal North Carolina.” Bright sun and light winds made for a pleasant stroll across the island, where greater yellowlegs and the rare piping plover hunted marine life along the beach and in pools of water.
The next day, we made a couple more stops before heading home. The first was at Fort Macon State Park, where we watched big sea-ducks called eiders through high-powered spotting scopes and, closer by, purple sandpipers on the rock jetty.
Next, we made a brief visit to the easternmost extent of Croatan National Forest. At our first stop on the dirt road, the long-leaf pine forest was eerily silent. But just a mile or so away, lots of birds flitted among the treetops as we pulled to a stop.
We were watching a pine warbler and several brown-headed nuthatches when I heard a distinctive bird voice, and four endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers flew into the pines.
Over the course of the weekend, our group found 144 species of birds, which goes to show just how rewarding winter birding can be.
The Audubon Society of Forsyth County will meet at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Historic Bethabara Park Visitor Center. I will be the guest speaker. My talk is “Alaska: Really Wild.”
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