On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
This week we’re at the beach with Albatrossity, then off to Australia for a day with currawong, then off to the stars with BillinGlendaleCA. The rest of the week is a trip to the barn withJanieM, followed by Steve in Mendocino whisking us away to vineyards in France. We have quite the week ahead!
Albatrossity
Week two of some images from a recent stay on the beach at Emerald Isle NC, with some sea-life, sunsets and sunrises, and, of course, some birds!
Sunrises and sunsets on a beach are always interesting, and sometimes magnificent. We did not see the legendary green flash during our time there, but we certainly looked for that at every opportunity! In the meantime we saw glorious sunrises, like this one
And glorious sunsets, like this one. With two Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) tossed in for good measure!
Shorebirds often can be abundant on beaches, and are always fun to watch. In the fall they can appear in many different plumages, as they are molting from the showy summer plumage into a more mundane winter outfit. This Ruddy Turnstone (Arenaria interpres) has lost its red flank feathers and harlequin markings on the face, but will retain the spiffy black bib all winter long. We only saw these guys sporadically on this beach, but it was a treat, because they certainly are infrequently spotted in my regular haunts back in Kansas.
Another typical beach shorebird is the Willet (Tringa semipalmata), which stride along the littoral line looking for mole crabs or other tasty tidbits. And sometimes they practice their yoga moves, like this one. Willets have two North American populations, Eastern and Western, and they are quite different in more than just geographical distribution. Eastern Willets, are strictly coastal year-round. Western birds breed in the interior and migrate to the coasts in winter. So this could be an Eastern or a Western bird; they are very hard to distinguish outside of the breeding range
Sanderlings (Calidris alba) are much more common beach denizens, and could be found on the beach just about anytime and anywhere, scooting back and forth just ahead of the waves like little hydrophobic windup toys. But generally they are brown/gray on the back, with very black legs and bill. So I was surprised to see this one, which has some sort of pigmentation issues, hanging out with a flock of regular Sanderlings. It had a few brownish feathers, but was mostly pure white, and the legs and bill are dark red rather than black. I was even more surprised when I looked into the literature and could find no mention of Sanderlings with plumage pigmentation abnormalities. This bird is, as they say, very unique!
Another regular sighting along this coast, Common Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) patrolled just offshore, often following the shrimp trawlers. I got lucky that this one decided to leap mostly out of the water as I was snapping the picture. One of the other dolphins in this pod had a fishing lure and line trailing from its dorsal fin, which I suspect is a common happening along this heavily fished part of the coast.
Barrier island beaches are nice, but in order to see more birds it was necessary to visit some of the local salt marshes and woodlands. Formerly known as the Red-eyed Towhee and lumped with the western species now known as Spotted Towhee, this male Eastern Towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus) seems to be of the pale-eyed alleni subspecies. Which is, according to the literature, restricted to Florida and extreme southern Georgia. No longer. Thanks probably to climate change, it is extending its range northward, with plenty of sightings in North Carolina and even some in Virginia, according to the map at eBird.
Salt marshes are hotbeds of biodiversity, and that includes birds. Tricolored Herons (Egretta tricolor) are commonly found there, and since they are only rarely found in the interior US, I stalked this one for a while!
There were three species of very secretive sparrows that I found in a nearby saltmarsh, and none of them behaved themselves in a way that would allow a good portrait. I got lousy pics of all three, Saltmarsh Sparrow (Ammosspiza caudacuta), Seaside Sparrow (Ammospiza maritima), and Nelson’s Sparrow (Ammospiza nelsoni), but this Nelson’s Sparrow was the best shot I got. Hiding in the saltmarsh grasses and never venturing into plain sight, it forced me to abandon the autofocus (which really really wanted to take pictures of the grasses) and go back to the bad old days of manual focus! Maybe I would have better luck in the spring, when maybe these birds would sing from more exposed perches. I’ll have to go back and find out, I suppose!
As the tide came in one day, I found three juvenile White Ibises (Eudocimus albus) feeding on fiddler crabs and small fish in a slough that had a boardwalk nearby. This one had captured a small American Eel, and after dropping it in the mud, it rinsed it off in this small puddle before gobbling it down. I also love the bird’s warped shadow in this image!
SiubhanDuinne
Albatrossity, your photos — as always — are simply amazing. Thank you for sharing your artistic gifts and deep knowledge with us.
OzarkHillbilly
It’s the humpback of Emerald Isle!
sab
My dad’s nursing home has a flock of resident ducks. They have a duck house where they are fed and locked up every night. In the warmer months there is also a flock of Canada geese that spend their summer there nefore migrating south.
This year one of the geese broke her wing, so she could not fly and could not migrate. We were very worried. Apparently she decided to become a large duck, so she is spending winter in the duck house being fed by the nursing home staff.
Rob
I love starting off the week with Albatrossity’s photos.
sab
@sab: I forgot to say they all have a nice big pond, which is why they are there.
Mathguy
The sunrise and sunset photos are extraordinary.
Betty
I like the photo with the sparrow among the grasses just as it is. That ibis beak is phenomenal, and the shadow is cool.
Wag
The second shot may be one of the best that you’ve ever posted. Amazing.
Quinerly
Beautiful pictures. I spent summers growing up in Emerald Isle’s neighboring Salter Path/Indian Beach from 1965-1977. Then from 1977 until 3/2020 my parents and l had a place at neighboring Pine Knoll Shores, NC. North Carolina’s beautiful Southern Outer Banks!!! Hope you made it over to see our Banker Ponies at Shackleford Banks.
Absolutely stunning photos. Thanks for posting. ??????
mvr
@Betty: What Betty said about the sparrow!
mvr
And I like the Heron photo as well!
Thanks for your photos. And glad to hear someone else has trouble w auto-focus getting obsessed with the wrong thing. I’m finding that the auto-focus lenses have less travel in their manual focus and hence it is also harder to switch to manual. And of course my eyesight is not quite what it used to me. Their auto-focus doesn’t work for anything I can touch.
Albatrossity
@Quinerly: We didn’t get to see the ponies; I was content to just poke around in the forests and salt marshes. But the region is lovely, and there is plenty to see and do!
donatellonerd
gorgeous. all of them.
AM in NC
Thank you, as always, for not only your amazing photos, but also your wealth of ornithological knowledge. We frequently vacation on the NC coast, and I have only recently started trying to ID some of the birds we see, and your IDs and info are great helps to me!
MelissaM
Years ago we had a large family vacation on Hilton Head. I was the only one who would make it up for sunrise, and for a couple days there was a fisherman attempting his craft, and a heron waiting patiently behind him to, I suppose, steal his breakfast.
Albatrossity, the pictures are lovely.
Chat Noir
Shore birbs! Beautiful pix as always.
stinger
Such an interesting fact about the Willets, and that white Sanderling! Calidris alba albatrossus!
That sunset picture should hang in a museum. The heron, sparrow, and ibis photos are also really great, for all the reasons others have mentioned above.
J R in WV
That first photo, that’s amazing light! And all teh birb photos are really good, as usual. Even the tiny sparrow in the tall grass. I too have trouble with auto-focus getting stuck on a glass window, or a twig, anything but the thing I want to take a photo of. Grrr
Love the whole set, thanks again as always!
Yutsano
Every picture seems to have a story, but I was a bit heartbroken about the dolphin with the fishing line in the fin. I wonder if there is some sort of hotline one could call so the poor thing could get that addressed.
Quinerly
@Albatrossity: ??
Madeleine
Though it’s the birds that I’m eager to see every Monday, that sunset is breathtaking!
I’ve seen green and night and many blue herons, but I’ve never seen a tricolor. And now I’d like to.
The ibis with eel and warped shadow makes me smile.
Thanks, Albatrossity.
Tehanu
Wow. Just … wow. Thank you.