It may have been too windy for a pelagic trip and the forecast may have scared away people from joining me but as you can see from the trip list, Bert Filemyr, Lynn Jackson and I had a very good day of birding. While the wind and waves made birding the inlet not as productive as it has been in past years, the marina and Rehobeth Bay were excellent with common goldeneye, horned and pied-billed grebe, lesser scaup, common and red-throated loon and hooded and red-breasted mergansers.

Silver Lake in Rehobeth held its usual and expect wintering flock of canvasbacks along with black ducks, ruddy ducks, northern shovelers and mallards. Unfortunately, there were no ring-necked on redheads this year. A quick trip into Cape Henlopen State Park yielded brown-headed and red-breasted nuthatches in the campground and dunlin, purple sandpipers, and ruddy turnstones from Herring Point.

Heading north we stopped at Prime Hook NWR while we didn’t find the northern shrike, we did find savannah, swamp, song, white-crowned and white-throated sparrows in the fields there. We made out last stops at Cartanza Road and a quick loop through Bombay Hook NWR.

Species List

Red-throated Loon
Common Loon
Pied-billed Grebe
Horned Grebe
Double-crested Cormorant
Great Cormorant
Great Blue Heron
Black-crowned Night-Heron
Tundra Swan
Snow Goose
Canada Goose
Brant
Gadwall
Green-winged Teal
Mallard
American Black Duck
Northern Pintail
Northern Shoveler
Canvasback
Lesser Scaup
Long-tailed Duck
Common Goldeneye
Bufflehead
Hooded Merganser
Red-breasted Merganser
Common Merganser
Ruddy Duck
Black Vulture
Turkey Vulture
Bald Eagle
Northern Harrier
Sharp-shinned Hawk
Red-tailed Hawk
American Kestrel
American Coot
Black-bellied Plover
Killdeer
Ruddy Turnstone
Sanderling
Dunlin
Purple Sandpiper
Ring-billed Gull
Great Black-backed Gull
American Herring Gull
Rock Pigeon
Mourning Dove
Belted Kingfisher
Downy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
Horned Lark
Carolina Wren
Northern Mockingbird
Eastern Bluebird
American Robin
Carolina Chickadee
Brown-headed Nuthatch
Red-breasted Nuthatch
Blue Jay
American Crow
European Starling
House Sparrow
House Finch
American Goldfinch
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Savannah Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Swamp Sparrow
White-crowned Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
Dark-eyed Junco
Northern Cardinal
Red-winged Blackbird
Eastern Meadowlark
Boat-tailed Grackle
Common Grackle