New Jersey

In our wonderful state of New Jersey, the main airport is all but paralyzed, bus/train system is on strike, and two main freeways are blocked by sinkholes. But life here is not all gloom and doom. This morning I escaped to a nearby park for two hours of birding and it was a near-tropical experience: hot, humid, foggy, drizzly, a few small agile mosquitoes, and an exuberantly green, dense forest (in a deer exclosure). I even got authentic rainforest-birding neck pain from looking up into the canopy. Some of our summer birds look totally tropical, too (the ones I was after do not, but are cool nonetheless). Alas, I’ve seen all our bird species, and even my short “better view desired” list is rapidly shrinking. The one removed from that list today was the black-billed cuckoo: saw two of them in a tiny mixed flock with a yellow-billed cuckoo, rapidly annihilating a mini-outbreak of tent caterpillars.