East Pond, Jamaica Bay - 10 Aug 2014.

After several months taken up with packing, winding up an old house and job, traveling, finding a new house and job, unpacking, sorting out children and all the other tasks that crop up when moving to a new country I am finally able to devote some time to birding. With autumn migration season looming the obvious place to start is with shorebirds, and the best place for that near New York is Jamaica Bay, specifically the East Pond.

One of the benefits of birding in New York became immediately obvious as soon as I arrived, the presence of other birders! Having become used to mostly solo birding in Lao and the Philippines I'd almost forgotten how much more I enjoy birding in company.

I started at 6:00am, about 2 hours before high tide, and walked northwards up the east side of the East Pond. The site is a high tide roost for the thousands of shorebirds that feed on the intertidal zone at Jamaica Bay. Most immediately obvious are the flocks of stints that feed along the shore of the pond. The most numerous bird in these flocks was Semipalmated Sandpiper, with plenty of Least Sandpipers and the occasional White-rumped Sandpiper. We tried to turn several birds into Western Sandpiper, but none were truly convincing, so that will have to wait. Semipalmated Plover were scattered along the shore. As we walked north we stared to find flocks of Short-billed Dowitcher, but no Long-billed among them. A large flock of Black-bellied (Grey) Plover was roosting at the north-west corner of the pond. Of more interest was a Pectoral Sandpiper and a Stilt Sandpiper, as well as a small flock of Ruddy Turnstone, and 3 American Oystercatcher.

Flocks of gulls were also well represented, mostly Laughing Gull, with quite a few American Herring Gull and a couple of Great Black-backed Gull, though the only terns were Common Tern. Lots of Great White Egrets and Snowy Egrets, but only one each of Great Blue Heron and Little Blue Heron.

At the start a Peregrine was hunting at the south end, and we feared it may scare off most of the birds, but it clearly had had a good morning already as soon disappeared.

Along the edge of the reeds were many Northern Waterthrush.

Juvenile Least Sandpiper. They seem to like feeding right at the edge of the phragmites and will often be left behind when the flocks of Semipalmated Sandpipers take off.

Semipalmated Sandpiper. This species has a very large variation in bill length with many long-billed individuals having a superficial resemblance to Western Sandpiper.

White-rumped Sandpiper. At first these were tricky to pick out of the flocks, but once I had my eye in the slightly larger size, elongated shape and long primary projection were fairly clear.

Juvenile Short-billed Dowitcher. Separating the two species of Dowitcher has always seemed to me to be one of the trickier identification challenges. In juvenile plumage however they are much less confusing.

Semipalmated Plover.