[SBB] EEC & Black Tern

["Chuq Von Rospach" <[[email protected]]>]

Decided to take my walk today out at EEC, since I just didn't have enough photos of black-necked stilts... 

Seriously, a quick look at the State & Spreckles marsh showed at least 200 stilts and three yellowlegs and not much else.

Heading over to EEC and out to the salt pond, I ran into a couple of others who were watching the Black Tern, it was intermittently sitting on the island, feeding on the algae bed, and turning itself invisible. After they left, I decided to hang out a bit and see if it'd re-appear. 

It finally did, and pictures should arrive shortly online. For those of you wondering (as I did) "do I have a chance in heck of figuring this out without hiring an expert, and would I know a black tern if it came up and bit me?", the beginner's guide to how I IDed the bugger: The Forster's tend to hunt at a relatively high elevation -- 10-15 feet off the water. When I first noticed the black tern, I thought it was a shorebird  (honestly!) trying to fly to the island into the headwind. I then realized it was hunting. It tends to hunt much closer to the water (4 feet or so), and fly at a much slower pace than the Forsters'. It also seemed to prefer hunting closer to the edge of the algae mat, where the Forsters' were hunting everywhere on the mat. The Black Tern also does a controlled fly-in to grab its prey, not the "plunge and pray" of the Forster's.

Once I was able to identify the different behavior, I got very nice looks at the bird, and THEN I could see the difference in plumage; trying to ID it out of hundreds of Forsters in various stages of youthful plumages -- not a chance. Nor did I ever ID the bird while it was on the island, only while it was flying and hunting. 

But -- if I could do it, you can. Seriously... (That, and ability to see what's different out of thousands of seemingly random actions...)

Other birds -- some dowitchers on the island, phalaropes (I think red-necked, don't trust me yet) in the channels near the boardwalk, more western sandpipers than you could ever care to count, snowy egrets and one or two greats, four turkey vulture, and a couple of pied-billed grebes. I also thought I saw another grebe way out in the NW corner of the salt pond, but it dove and I lost it before I could say anything more than "grebe-like and not another pied-billed"; heck, it looks like the pied-bills were fruitful and prosperous this season, but not as fruitful and prosperous as the stilts -- driving into EEC, I saw four very downy, days-old stilts in the area just to the north of the road, with parents standing fitfully by. 

And maybe I remember  wrong, but I thought stilts raised a 1-2 kids? So was this a multi-bird family to have four? All were pretty much the same age, barely knee-high (well, ankle-high) to a parent and completely gray, so maybe less than a week old -- that seems late to me? 

Also a couple of killdeer out near the boardwalk, one great blue heron and a black-necked night heron in the channel to the east of the salt pond, gulls (mostly california, I think; dark irises, pale legs).

Photos shortly.

-- 
Chuq Von Rospach
([[email protected]]; http://chuqui.typepad.com)
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