Considering this was the only chaseable (apparently not a word) record in NC, the other being at sea from a cruise ship, it was quite disappointing to miss it. Since I was 30 minutes from Raleigh, I decided to stay around and search for it with the rest of the schmucks that missed it. A GroupMe was created to coordinate a search of all the lakes in the Raleigh area and it soon grew to include lakes in adjacent counties. I volunteered to check Lake Johnson and was a little surprised to find birders there looking for it. After scouring Lake Johnson I decided to check a lake in the general direction of home and randomly picked Lake Benson in Garner. No dice there either but I was surprised to find a nice park which I had never been to before. The triangle area has so many parks compared to New Hanover county.
This Nutria at Lake Benson was the only picture I came away with.
The good thing about being in Garner was that I could practically smell the City BBQ restaurant from where I was. As I was enjoying a Beef Brisket sandwich, I got a call from the wife and she asked if I was going to stay up in Raleigh to try for the booby again in the morning. Up to then it hadn't occurred to me but she was right, if it showed up tomorrow I would just have to drive all the way back up the next day. So I got a hotel room and while I was there I created a fresh plan to visit some new counties checking some big water features and being generally close in case someone relocated the booby.
I started Saturday early in the morning by driving to a randomly selected hotspot in Granville County called Horseshoe Road Nature Preserve. Granville County is sandwiched between two of the biggest lakes in NC with Kerr Lake in the north and Falls Lake in the south. If a Booby was going to turn up, these are good lakes to be near.
Granville County is the 35th largest county at 531 square miles and has 60k people in it. Its amazing how spread out and rural it is once you drive 20-30 minutes out of the triangle.
Horseshoe Road Nature Preserve is a parcel of land owned by the Tar River Land Conservancy. I couldn't find much info on it other than it is a eBird Hotspot for the county. It ended up being a really nice walk of a couple miles through pine barrens, beaver marsh and hardwood forrest. I don't have any bird pics to share, just some iPhone pics of the scenery.
Pine Barrens
Beaver Marsh
Hardwood Forest
All in all it was about a 2.5 mile hike with some gently rolling topography. A very nice walk but not very birdy.
At this point there still were no reports of the booby so I decided to keep heading north and explore Kerr Lake which seemed like a good bet for a wayward booby. Here is an interesting snippet from Wiki on Kerr Lake:
"Kerr Lake /kɑr/ (officially John H. Kerr Reservoir, also known as Bugg's Island Lake[1]) is a reservoir along the border of the U.S. states of North Carolina and Virginia. It is impounded by the John H. Kerr Dam, constructed between 1947 and 1952 to produce hydroelectricity and to provide flood control. Kerr Lake is owned by the US Army Corps of Engineers, and is the largest reservoir in Virginia. It is located in parts of Vance, Granville, and Warren counties in North Carolina, and Mecklenburg, Charlotte, and Halifax counties in Virginia. At its maximum capacity, it is one of the largest reservoirs in the Southeastern United States, covering approximately 50,000 acres (200 km2) and bordered by over 850 miles (1,370 km) of shoreline. The lake is named for Congressman John H. Kerr of North Carolina, who supported the original creation of the lake."
Interesting that Virginia has counties all named the same as ones in NC (Mecklenburg, Charlotte, and Halifax).
My first choice was the Satterwhite Point which is part of a state park and is equipped for a ton of people which I gather happens in the summer. However it was pretty much empty when I was there. The weather was nice with sun but the wind was howling off the lake and it was difficult to scan the water without tears streaming down my face. I had picked this location as it is exposed to multiple arms of the lake and I figured if a booby was flying around this would be a good place to find it.
I only walked around for about a mile and ran into some common birds but nothing worth sharing except maybe this Red-headed Woodpecker.
And some Fish Crows doing the Uh Uh call.
Satterwhite Point sits firmly within Vance County which is the 90th largest county (10th smallest) and only has 44k people. It's fairly rural where the land doesn't touch the lake. Vance County is about half African American and its most famous resident was Ben E King, composer and singer from the amazing Stand By Me song.
Photo credit from Wikipedia.
The county seat is Henderson but I just blew by it on the highway.
The next stop was also a state park on Kerr Lake about 10 miles east but it sat firmly in Warren County. Kimball Point State Park is another peninsula jutting out into Kerr Lake and the northern tip of that peninsula is basically touching the Virginia state line. When I showed up I had a flash back to about ten years ago when I came here in the winter and had the same problem, the gate was closed. Apparently this park is seasonal and its not open for the winter. However, this time I didn't just turn around and leave. A local pulled up to the gate in a golf cart with her kids and I asked them if it was ok to park at the entrance and walk around and she kind of shrugged and went in herself with her kids. I didn't see any signs posted with no trespassing so I followed her in and walked around.
I didn't spend too long at this park in case I really wasn't welcome and to be honest the birding was very similar to Satterwhite with tons of Juncos and Crows but not much else. I scanned as much of the water as I could, satisfied that no boobies were flying around.
Warren County is a mid-sized county at 428 square miles and just under 20k people. Much like Vance County, it has an about 50% African American population. The county seat is Warrenton located generally in the middle of the county. Apparently Warren was a Revolutionary War general. Wikipedia says it is famous for a huge landfill that spawned the environmental justice movement. The PCB Landfill was started in 1982 in an area mostly inhabited by African Americans in a disadvantaged socio-economic bracket. Here is part of the Wiki entry:
In response to the court's decision to make Warren County the site of the PCB landfill, protests ensued. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) staged a massive protest where more than 500 protesters were arrested.[7] Not only did the protest impact the community itself, but it emerged as the birthplace of many environmental justice studies in regard to hazardous waste facilities being placed in minority communities. Without the protests and displeasures that the African Americans voiced in Warren County, the United Church of Christ would not have studied the implicit bias found while examining where hazardous waste facilities were placed all over the United States.
Five years later, the United Church of Christ published a report that race was the most significant factor in determining where hazardous waste facilities would be placed. Finding 3 out of every 5 African Americans and Hispanics live in a community housing a toxic waste site. This led to both Presidents George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton to implement policy to make sure that waste sites would not be placed in completely minority neighborhoods.[7] The site was not made safe until 2004.
So Kudos to the people of Warren County for kicking off the movement that has received so much attention lately.
It was getting later in the day and I was planning to make it home for dinner, so I decided I would make one more stop on the way home and figured Franklin County directly south of Warren would be a good choice.
Franklin County is another mid-sized county at 491 square miles but has a much larger population than the counties to the north primarily due to its proximity to Raleigh. Louisburg is the county seat and conveniently in the middle of the county.
I always like Botanical Gardens so when I saw that one of the birding hotspots in Franklin was a Botanical Gardens it wasn't a hard decision on where to go. Dehart Botanical Gardens is a property owned and maintained by Louisburg College. Its right off the 401 highway and consequently it had quite a lot of road noise even on the further trails of which I think I took all of them.
To be honest, as botanical gardens go, this one was a little lame. There were barely any tags on the plants which I thought was the trademark of a botanical garden. Otherwise it's just a garden. This is what Wiki says about it:
A botanical garden or botanic garden[nb 1] is a garden with a documented collection of living plants for the purpose of scientific research, conservation, display, and education.[1] Typically plants are labelled with their botanical names.
Redbud is blooming early it seems.
The ride home was uneventful. I have started listening to a podcast called The Science of Birds. The guy that does it is super nerdy but he cracks me up.
On Tuesday I had taken a day off to go out on a boat trip out of Morehead with some friends from back in the days when I used to make the trip up to North River Farms on the weekend. Marty W organized the trip and John F was there and some other folks I had not met before. The boat was run by Jess Hawkins of Crystal Coast Ecotours. I had been on his boat before. A super nice guy but it seems this was the second time we intended to go out in the ocean but instead had to stay in the bays because of the conditions at sea. Marty had even brought some menhaden oil and chum to try for some pelagic species but we never made it out into the ocean. I don't think it was Captain Hawkins' fault, we just picked a bad day. Apparently the day before was sheet glass on the ocean.
Great Cormorants on the platform off of Fort Macon.
Long-billed Curlew
A little later one materialized right next to us.
That sure is a long bill.
The closest we got to open ocean was east of Fort Macon in the inlet and then again at the "Hook" end of Cape Lookout. This is where we had some Razorbills.
Some of the Common Loons were coming into their breeding plumage.
After the pseudo-pelagic, it was still early so I headed back to Fort Macon to bird from shore.
Nothing unusual, just a ton of Bonaparte's Gulls working the waves and some came to shore to rest a bit.
These guys walked past and I could almost smell his back burning. It always amazes me that people still don't wear sun protection and smoke cigarettes. It's almost as if people don't understand the link to cancer or maybe they just rather roll the dice anyhow.
Larry Birds is up to 29 counties for the year! 71 to go.
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