Steve Arlow Birding: Cape May : September 2019 (part 1)

The purpose of this trip was to fill the void left by not being able to get onto Fair Isle in late September due to the devastating fire that destroyed the Observatory building earlier in the year. I had looked at a number of options, including Israel for the Lesser Spotted Eagle migration in late September however I eventually chose Cape May as it had long been a bucket list destination for this migration junky and I would be there during the peak migration period, I just had to hope for North West winds during the trip.

Things did not get off to a very good start. Once we arrived in the U.S. we experienced the notoriously long queues for U.S. immigration, taking well over an hour to get through; this was then followed by lots of phaffing around with the car rental company as they were going to give me a piece of crap Kia Soul which was neither close to the type of car we were expecting and was really not fit for our purpose (see the section around car hire/rental further below). Once we finally got a better car we headed off in the wrong direction, the signage in New York is appalling, and resulted in us getting lost and ended up trying to work out how to get the hell out of Queens, my maps were all based on getting us to Cape May from the Airport. This ‘detour’ of several hours going round in one-way circles meant we were then in travelling in rush hour traffic once on the correct road and then subsequently stuck in a near motionless traffic jam due to an accident on Staten Island. Many a wrong turn and slow traffic meant that the 3hour expected drive took over 7hours!!!! I was not happy bunny.

When it finally came to the birding it was often very slow, very slow meaning dead. There were glimmers of what Cape May could do with some North West winds mid trip giving some much needed songbird migration here and there but numbers were generally low with many expected species missing. Waders (shorebirds) were hard to come by and raptor passage was slow, perhaps I’ve been spoilt by ‘real’ raptor migration in Israel. As a result this trip ended up being my least enjoyable of any I’ve made to North America, this being by seventh trip. Even photography was challenging and very few ‘songbirds’ were snapped as many were high up in tall fully leafed out trees or hiding in dense cover. I usually come back from a trip with a whole host of photos to go through, this time around I have about a quarter of those I would normally expect to take.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom as there were obviously some highlights. The butterflies throughout were real winners, the time I spent in the Cape May Bird Observatory garden sifting through the warblers on the 25^th September, finally finding a proper gathering of waders at Edwin B. Forsythe NWR, the Black Skimmer flock, the abundant and approachable Forster’s Terns and one to one experiences with some smashing warblers for example.

However from talking to local, and regular visiting, birders many had never seen it so quiet here in ‘the fall’. This may have been as a result of Hurricane Dorien a week or so earlier messing with the weather. A further ‘however’ though is that, as an observation made by a long-standing local birder, is that there does appear to have been a longer downward trend in both the frequency of ‘falls’ as a result of lack of North West Winds. There used to be near weekly North Westerlies but now it’s just once or twice an autumn, if you’re lucky. In addition to that is that the volume of birds are well down on the historical numbers when it blows from the North West. I guess it’s a sign of the times of changing weather patterns affecting bird migrations and overall world bird populations rapidly falling.

Apart from the few scattered birding and wildlife highlights I found myself largely bored and my motivation was long gone by the middle of the second week of the trip; I was ready to leave after one week but had to endure the second week. I really think Cape May is living on reputation and past glories as it doesn’t seem to be the place it once was.

The species accounts further down this trip report make it look like a bird filled trip but this is anything but the truth and I think recent trip reports on Cloudbirders may also falsely imply more birds here than there actually are.

At the end of each trip I ask myself, “will I return?”. With my annual trips to Israel it is always an easy ‘YES I will’ as even when it is quiet it’s never ‘this’ quiet. So for Cape May “will I return?”, the answer is an emphatic NO. I should have enjoyed this trip more but the place just did not gel with me so I will not return.

So with the above I have attempted to select the best images from the relatively few taken.

Firstly the Butterflies; these were perhaps the over riding wildlife success of the trip and I spent more time watching and photographing these guys than the birds.

Common Buckeye - I absolutely love this butterfly