Cruisin' Cape Cod or Birding the Cape

I remember when really creative titles or titles that seemed to not make any sense until you got to the end of the post and even then were still kind of random was my shtick. At the old birderbabe.blogspot.com blog, that's what I did. Now they are so straight forward. Oh well.

Anyway, a couple days ago, Birdchick, Julie, Ben, John, Corey, Birdfreak, myself, and a bunch of cool guys from Swarovski headed over to Cape Cod to watch some birds.

It started off with an awesome skimmer sighting when we got there (along with a cute semi-palmated plover and belted kingfisher.) Skimmers are possibly the coolest birds out there. Seriously, they are so bad @$$! Excuse me when I say that, but c'mon folks, take a look at this:

http://identify.whatbird.com/obj/452/overview/Black_Skimmer.aspx

Tell me that isn't the coolest, most beautiful bird you have ever seen! We were all cheering when we saw them and Julie was telling them how beautiful they are. And, luckily, we got to see them actually do what skimmers do best besides look cool: skim the surface of the water with their beaks to catch fish.

Anyway, once we got on the boat to get to a certain part of the Cape where we would bird our brains out, we saw cormorants, tons of gulls, and even a cute gray seal (!). Yeah, that's right. A seal. It was awesome.

Then, when we got there, we saw tons of sanderlings, willets, whimbrels, red knots, semi-palmated plovers, adorable piping plovers and their puff-ball young, sandpipers of all sorts, ruddy turnstones (including 2 that had an extremely aggressive fight that eventually ended with no real winner), and marbled godwits.

Look at those cute tiny footprints!
And what a cute, tiny bird! I love sanderlings.


There was one sanderling that would get pretty close to us. As our birding trip continued we saw more adorable piping plovers and their chicks. They were SO cute. We also saw awesome oystercatchers and tons of Horseshoe crabs.
Julie Z. with live Horseshoe Crabs!!
Pretty cool.

Then, after watching all those awesome birds, we got a whole bunch of gulls. At first, we saw a lot of Herrings.

Where we saw the Piping Plover chicks.
John.


A dead Horseshoe Crab.

Then we saw a bunch of Great Black-backed Gulls, and in the middle of them all was a Lesser Black-Backed Gull! As the day progressed we then saw tons of Common Terns. While we were watching them, a Roseate Tern flew in! We were all excited. It was a much purer white than the other Terns and was very beautiful. 

He's very pretty, isn't he?



And finally, after we spied on the tern, we found a dead Gannett! 

Pretty cool, huh? Well, that's it. We had a lot of fun.

Cape Cod is a beautiful place, and I definitely would recommend birding there.