I had big plans this past weekend for kicking off the New Year properly by making my annual pilgrimage to East Shackleford Banks in Carteret County to pick up a couple long-standing rarities that hang out there if you know where to look. There is a Bar-tailed Godwit that has been visiting East Shack since 2016 when John Fussell originally found it. Long-billed Curlews are pretty impossible to find anywhere else in NC but a handful can be found on the Core Banks and East Shack is a great place for them. My trips out there in the winter also turn up huge numbers of Piping Plover and even some over-wintering Wilson's Plovers. These trips also have bonus mammals in the form of a population of Spanish Mustangs that date back to the 1500s!
Here is a map of the Core Banks courtesy of the National Park Service website. Shackleford is the south facing island just west of the cape. Back in 2016 we also had a Mountain Plover higher up on the Core Banks at Ophelia Inlet (see top right part of map). Cape Lookout on the Core Banks is a good place to pick up some of the only countable Ring-necked Pheasants in NC.
The National Park Service has awarded an exclusive contract to a company called Island Express Ferry Services that operates out of Beaufort and Harker's Island. If you want to go to East Shack, the best way is to take the ferry from Harker's and its a short but beautiful 20 minute ride out. East Shack is a stop on the way to to the real destination most people go to which is Cape Lookout. Cape Lookout is where the lighthouse and other tourist attractions are. The East Shack stop is a sometimes wet drop off on a sandy beach using a ladder, no dock to speak of. The water around here is unusually clear and blue due to the lack of rivers which are normally the source of the tannins that make coastal water mirky like down where I live at the mouth of the Cape Fear. That is why the area including the Core Banks is often called the Crystal Coast.
But I digress..... let's start with some pics from around Wilmington in the week leading up to my pilgrimage. I have been heading to the "Rocks" at the tip of Fort Fisher most mornings to watch the sunrise reasoning that on the way back I can drive by the site were Jesse found the White-crowned Pigeon. Also its just a beautiful place to be for sunrise.
Marsh Wren at the "Rocks".
A classic Saltmarsh Sparrow! Some of the sharp-tailed complex of sparrows are hard to ID and in fact many of them may be hybrids, but every once in a while you get an easy one. The yellow malar contrasts nicely with the flanks and breast on this one, and the streaks are dark and thick.
Northern Mockingbird
Song Sparrow
Gadwall on the way home at Ashley High School
In the evenings I have been trying to catch most sunsets. The birding is always slow in the evening as many birds have already settled in.
Johnnie Mercer Pier is one of the best places to catch the sunset.
I have noticed every evening the resident Rock Pigeons start acting a little crazy. They get up in the air and just fly back and forth over and over in a crazy aerial ballet. I suppose they do this all over the world but its fun to watch them do it over the pier with the sun setting in the background. Some people may remember the movie American Beauty where the leave or flower petal or something dances in the wind. Well this is my American Beauty moment.
The next morning I was able to pick out a Purple Sandpiper at the "Rocks" at Fort Fisher. For those of you that have not been to Federal Point, the best time to go is high tide as all the waders get pushed out of the mud flats onto the rocks. You have to be careful to use the right tide charts as the river side is 2 hours later than the ocean. I usually search "Zeke's Island Tide Chart" to get the timing right.
Marbled Godwits are regular here.
Snowy Egret
Palm Warblers are usually more prevalent than they have been this year.
Ruddy Turnstone basking in the evening light for another Johnnie Mercer sunset.
Brown Pelican - I have been testing my camera on low light situations and it does formidably well compared to my old rig.
Laughing Gull
Amazing what a few minutes can do to a sunset!
Meanwhile another sunrise at Fort Fisher also produced a Moonset.
Least Sandpiper at the rocks.
I was standing on the rocks sifting through the shorebirds when a local birder Liling creeped up behind me and scared the crap out of me nearly knocking me off my slippery perch.
An American Avocet flew in from the disappearing mudflats and landed on the rocks. Although Avocets are common up on the OBX, they are few and far between down in New Hanover County.
Once perched up on the rocks the Avocet stuck out like a big white sore thumb.
Assorted Shorebirds.
Eurasian Collared Dove at CB Lake.
Bald Eagle - I did manage to get away from work quickly before closing time at Airlie Gardens.
One of the few older statues at Airlie that are not kitschy.
Wood Ducks love the place despite the noisy staff who are constantly whizzing around gas powered ATVs.
Speaking annoying noisy people, a visit to the north end of Wrightsville Beach is usually a way to get some respite from the constant noise pollution that plagues the "civilized" world, but not this time.
A bunch of teenagers were skeet shooting on the island just next to the north end. This can't be legal so close to a Waterbird Management Area can it? Wouldn't surprise me if it were.
Despite the cacophony next door, I was able to find a nice banded Piping Plover among the hundreds of Semipalmated Plovers in the sand moguls on the north end.
Dunlins and other shorebirds lit on fire in the evening light.
Black-bellied Plovers too.
The moonrise was perfectly timed with the sunset.
Shell Island bathing in Orange Sherbet.
Back to the real purpose of this post and the weekend adventure in Carteret County...
Initially I planned to arrive in the Jacksonville area in Onslow County and try birding a park there, but I arrived earlier than I calculated and it was still dark so I pushed on and decided to get the dawn chorus at Pringle Rd in Carteret County. Pringle Rd is a dirt road with Long Leaf Pine habitat much like the roads at Holly Shelter in Pender County where I usually pick up my Red-cockaded Woodpeckers.
Dawn the Rosy-Fingered greeting the Pringle Rd Pines.
It didn't take long to find a small family unit of Red-cockaded Woodpeckers but it did take a while to get a passable photo duet the low light early. By the time the light improved the RCWPs had moved on and I had to look hard for some more but finally found one that offered a decent shot.
I moved on with a plan to arrive at the Harker's Island dock shortly before the push-off time of 10am. I had called the Ferry company the day before to check that they would be running and he confirmed that they had 4 people booked on the 10am ferry to Shackleford. What he neglected to say was that the ferry at Harker's was down due to maintenance issues on the Cape Lookout dock and that they were only running trips to West Shackleford Banks from Beaufort which is a 30 minute drive from Harker's. By the time I got to the ticket window at Harker's and noticed that they were closed, I was too far to make it back to Beaufort in time for the 10am and I didn't want to go to West Shack anyhow. ARGHHHH! 6 hours of driving round trip due to a lack of communication by this concession. I just went to their website and its still not obvious that they are not running the Harker's Island ferry for the whole month of January. I wonder how many hours of people's lives they have wasted and will waste in the coming 3 weeks.
I decided to try and make lemonade with the lemons I was dealt and head to Beaufort to take a water taxi to Bird Shoals which is an island directly across from Beaufort that can hold huge numbers of shorebirds.
On the way to Beaufort I stopped at the North River Golf Club and checked a pond but didn't find anything of note except some American Wigeons which were new for my year effort mixed in with Gadwalls and Ruddy Ducks.
Large flocks of Eastern Meadowlarks fed on the fairways but I am guaranteed to get better photos later on the OBX.
The water taxi ride over to Bird Shoals was uneventful and ran smoothly and the captain of the boat commiserated with me on the state of affairs of the Park Service run concession from Harker's. He said that since the concession was awarded an exclusive contract, he had heard only negative things about it which is a shame because so many other locals could benefit from the tourism that the area could see and more options would generate competition which would drive quality of operations. A monopoly is never good and it's a shame that no one has been able to successfully challenge it. But off my soapbox and back to making some lemonade.
East Shack is not the only place to hang out with the feral mustang population, as you can see here from this one happily feeding on Bird Shoals.
Some of them really have interesting markings.
This one needed a haircut with his bangs hanging down into his eyes.
I walked the entire 3 miles to get to the east end of Bird Shoals where the shorebirds hang out and there were indeed thousands but they were sitting on a sand bar several hundreds yards away and it made photography impossible. I sifted through them as much as I could from that distance but couldn't find anything rare or unusual.
About the only picture I came away with after a 3 hour hike and 6 miles round trip was this group of Red-breasted Mergansers in the marsh in the middle of the island.
Hopefully the rest of 2023 treats me better..
After leaving Beaufort I decided to make a stop on the way home so I could explore a hotspot in Onslow County. I knew birding in the late afternoon on an overcast day in the center of a town was not going to be very eventful but it was nice to explore a new spot. Northeast Creek Park is in Jacksonville which is essentially a military town with Camp Lejeune basically within the city limits.
Hermit Thrush - this little guy/gal was kind of fat looking but he/she may just have been puffed up and annoyed at my presence in his/her neck of the woods.
The park itself was interesting with an old dilapidated boardwalk on the nearby swamp/river. I will need to visit it in the morning sometime to truly understand its potential. This late in the day there was drone operators and tons of frisbee golf devotees crawling all over the place.
Northern Cardinal
This Pileated Woodpecker nesting in a telephone pole bid me adieu as I got back into my truck and headed home.
Sunday was spent locally at Airlie and a few other spots.
Eastern Bluebird at Airlie.
Great Egret drying out after a bath.
Hooded Merganser are getting horny and displaying at the Airlie Pond.
Have you ever heard the bellow of a male Hooded Merganser? Powerful!
Looks like a bobblehead.
Canada Goose
Black-crowned Night-heron.
Yellow-rumped Warbler.
Some Ospreys overwinter in NC.
Northern Flickers are more often heard than seen.
A high soaring Sharp-shinned hawk with its small head and squared off tail.
Eastern Towhees called from seemingly everywhere.
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