although for convenience I will post the latest summary about this Bridled Tern right here at the top:
Ed: The Bridled Tern has NOT been seen the last four days (Aug.17-20) on or near GGI Great Gull Island, and may have moved on. Also noted around GGI during the past week were a few GREAT and CORY'S SHEARWATERS and up to 8 PARASITIC JAEGERS. This count from last Sunday.
AUG.19: No Bridled Tern yet today. Here is Joe DiCostanzo's report as of 6am Aug.19:
"The Bridled Tern that was on Great Gull I., Suffolk Co., has not been seen since Thursday despite three checks Friday and two on Saturday. Numbers of terns on the island are dropping now, so it may have departed with some of the Commons and Roseates. I will try to check again today, but the weather this morning is a bit rainy so I don�t know when I will get to the eastern end of the island."
AUG.18: Bridled Tern not seen today, Saturday, Aug.18th. Ian Devlin reports, "This afternoon 3:30pm-6pm. Significantly less tern activity on [Great] Gull Island. The Bridled Tern was a no-show on its usual spot. I circumnavigated the island to look in all other possible spots that can be seen by boat. No luck. It might have migrated away. Capt. Ian Devlin, East Norwalk, CT."
AUG.17: Not seen today at all on Great Gull Island on Friday, Aug.17th. Despite checks this morning, midday, and late afternoon, the Bridled Tern was not seen today by Joe DiCostanzo. Will be looked for tomorrow.
AUG.16: Seen the morning of Aug.16 by Joe DiCostanzo, in the usual place, before 8:09am. Also seen at 8:09am by Maggie Peretto, Tim Antanaitis and Dave from NY, on Ian Devlin's boat, after which the tern flew NE a long distance.
AUG.15: Seen the morning of Aug.15 by Joe DiCostanzo, in the usual place.
AUG.14: Seen the morning of Aug.14 by Joe DiCostanzo, in the usual place, around 8:40am.
AUG.13: Seen the morning of Aug.13 by Joe DiCostanzo, coming into the usual roosting place, flying in from the NE. Seas are rough today. Not a good day for a small boat.
AUG.12: Seen at 5:30pm Aug.12 by Joe DiCostanzo in the usual place, but not there earlier in the day, around 10:30am or 3:30pm.
AUG.11: Seen at 2:30pm Aug.11th by Joe DiCostanzo in the usual place on NE corner of GGIsland.
Inwood Birder: August 11 - Bridled Tern and other birds on Great Gull Island
AUG.10: Seen 4pm Friday Aug.10th by Mike Resch and Ian Devlin, around Great Gull Island, NY. Scroll down to see details near the bottom of this long post. Initially it was roosting on the island, but in a different (unknown) location - not its usual place. Later seen flying away from GGIsland around 5pm and could not be found in the next hour. Summarized in Mike's blog post here: http://statebirding.blogspot.com/2018/08/best-2-days-of-birding-ever-august-2018.html and on eBird: eBird Checklist – Great Gull Island, Suffolk County, New York, US – Fri Aug 10, 2018 – 11 species
AUG.9: Seen Thursday Aug.9th late afternoon by Bob Proniewych et al, on a hired boat out of Orient Pt, NY. The Bridled Tern approached Gr.Gull Island from south of Little Gull Island, with large flock of Common Terns.
See: eBird Checklist – Great Gull Island, Suffolk County, New York, US – Wed Aug 08, 2018 from Shai Mitra and Patricia Lindsay
AUG.6-8: Seen almost every day this week on Great Gull Island by Joe DiCostanzo, American Museum of Natural History researcher on Great Gull Island. See: inwoodbirder.blogspot.com
AUG.5: Seen and photographed Sunday August 5th by Tom Robben, on Great Gull Island, NY, while passing onboard the "Classic Lighthouses Cruise". That trip is detailed in THIS post, right here.
AUG.4: Seen by Joe DiCostanzo.
AUG.3: Seen first this year on August 3rd by Sean Sime and Joe DiCostanzo, on Great Gull Island, NY.
Note that in the last 30 days (since today Aug.11 ,2018), the red markers show only one Bridled Tern reported north of the Cape Hatteras area (and those were 1-3 birds well offshore between July 27 and August 4th and none photographed were in such great plumage as our NY bird)....
and that one Bridled Tern (that northernmost red symbol) is our Great Gull Island one...
Note that you can click on most of these images to enlarge them, and then press ESC key to return.
SITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION:
THIS WAS A VERY ENJOYABLE TRIP AND I WILL HAVE A LOT MORE TO SAY ABOUT THIS OVER THE NEXT WEEK, HERE...
BOTTOM LINE: I WILL DEFINITELY TAKE THIS TRIP AGAIN!
IF YOU ENJOY EXPLORING SOME NEW WATERS, THIS MAY BE A TRIP FOR YOU.
BACKGROUND:
On August 4th we observed another fish feeding frenzy just off Plum Island Light, which you can see in the other post, below here. I wanted to get closer to that area the next day, to try to learn more about the birds there and the fish, so I decided to do an experiment, to try the lighthouse cruise going out from New London CT on Sunday August 5th. It was a successful experiment!
THE TRIP:
If you like to explore eastern LIS and nearby locations (80% in NY waters), this was a fantastic 2 1/2 hour 55mile round trip (clockwise on the two satellite maps below, starting at 12:30pm in New London, CT). I highly recommend it, the "CLASSIC Lighthouse Cruise" -- a true value at $30. This was the first of these 3 "lighthouse cruises" and it began in mid-2015.
Note that there are TWO different lighthouse cruises from NewLondon (and a 3rd one from Orient Pt, NY), and I would NOT recommend the other one, the "Lights & Sights Cruise" from NewLondon, since its route seems to have been revised to exclude Little Gull Light and crossing over to those waters near Great Gull Island - at least that was true on August 9th when a friend took that trip.
It was 90F hot on August 5th, which resulted in 250 people on board the Cecelia Ann ship (which has capacity for 600!), an unusually high number for these trips. This lighthouses trip has had as few as a dozen passengers.
Bird-wise, the trip was consistent with everything we have been seeing about this area over the last few weeks, on the CT and especially the NY side.... so I saw no new species which have not been mentioned for this geographic area lately, except one Merlin flying south over western Gardiners Bay....
This is the CLASSIC route, not the Lights&Sights route (which does not cross over to the two Gull Islands!)
WHERE IS BIRD WATCHING BEING DONE?
Where is most seabird watching being done in this region? We can use Herring Gulls as an indicator for that, since Herring Gulls are everywhere in and around LIS Long Island Sound. See the following 3 eBird maps for Herring Gulls, where red markers indicate reports in the last 30 days, since today Aug.7, 2018. Note that a large concentration of bird watching has been done along the ferry route between NewLondon CT and OrientPt NY, and relatively little birding has been done elsewhere in the waters of LIS, especially at Little Gull Island and in Gardiners Bay... including the route this lighthouse cruise takes close to Plum Island, Great Gull Island and the Little Gull Island, plus the Gardiners Bay waters south of that string of islands. In other words, this "classic lighthouse cruise", if taken often, can provide us with new bird knowledge for marine areas which we do not have now!
zooming out to see more of the region...
and zooming out further to see even a wider area... note that bird observations are being performed and reported in some marine areas and hardly at all in many other areas...
TRIP SUMMARY:
FOR BRIDLED TERN DETAILS scroll down here,
AND ALSO GO TO JOE DICOSTANZO's EXCELLENT WEBSITE:
Inwood Birder << click to jump to Joe's blog and tern details...
On August 7th Joe kindly annotated this satellite map with blue, to show the main locations where he has seen the Bridled Tern... but be prepared for a long-distance look for this beautiful tern if you get there...
Note that there is a long-term research project on GGI Great Gull Island, since the 1960's....
Great Gull Island Project
with the largest concentration of nesting Common Terns in the world (9,500 pairs). The boulders dumped around the edge of the island to stabilize the shoreline, as well as some of the retaining walls of the fort, offer nesting sites for 1300 pairs of Roseate Terns, the largest nesting concentration of this endangered species in the Western Hemisphere.
GGI staff who are already helping our investigation of recent shearwater/tern/fish events around GGI are project director Helen Hays, Joe DiCostanzo, and Michael Male.
And here is a google satellite side-view which I annotated in yellow to show the Bridled Tern area, to show the south-looking view-point from a ship passing along the north side of the island, as our ship did on August 5th...
On August 5th, as our ship slowly cruised by the north side of the research island, I saw the Bridled Tern flying around the NE end of Great Gull Island, with my image-stabilized 10x42 binocs, and land on the rocks. Here is the NE corner of Great Gull Island, and the red oval is where I saw the Bridled Tern land on the rocks, more or less (I took this distant photo a few minutes after the two closer photos below it)...
Within a minute of the tern landing I got the following photo of that general area, and this tern (which I circled in red) appears to be the same bird I saw flying. Hopefully this photo will give you an idea where to look for this tern (and the difficulty of spotting it), at the far eastern end of Great Gull Island, along the north shore of the island, about 200feet west of the eastern point...
The following image is a magnified view of the image above... which Joe DiCostanzo commented on today 8/8, confirming the Bridled Tern in this photo, "Congratulations on getting your picture of the Bridled. It is very distant but it is clearly the bird. There are no other dark backed terns on the island at the moment. The large concrete structure behind the bird in your picture is where I photographed the bird last year." ...
Please note that if you do go to see this Bridled Tern it is quite distant from the ship, and you will probably not have the close-up view you are hoping for (I apologize for my long-distance photos above). The bird also departs the island sometimes, so there is no guarantee you will see it at all. But good luck if you try.
The latest information on this bird is usually available here:
http://birding.aba.org/maillist/NY01
Because of the many different areas covered by this wide-ranging trip I will start with a summary all-in-one species list, in arbitrary order (all birds seen in NY waters unless otherwise indicated):
Great Shearwater, 2.
Cory's Shearwater, 2.
Parasitic Jaeger, 1 dark phase, at North Dumpling Island, NY.
BRIDLED TERN, 1 adult, seen at distance around northeast rocks of Gr.Gull Island.
Common Tern, 1000+, mostly at the two Gull Islands, and scattered all around LIS.
Roseate Tern, 20+, mostly at Great Gull Island.
Forster's Tern, 3.
Least Tern, 0.
DC Cormorants, 100+, everywhere.
Northern Gannet, 0.
Herring Gull, 200+.
Gr. Black-backed Gull, 100+.
Laughing Gull, 5.
Ring-billed Gull, 4.
Tree Swallow, 1.
Merlin, 1, flying south over Gardiners Bay.
more to come
Bottom line, it appears that most of the shearwaters of the past two weeks are gone, and there was no fish frenzy off Plum Island Light on August 5th, as we had August 4th.
Most valuable about this trip was how many interesting locations it covered, so I could see which locations had which birds, or not. The locations covered by this "classic lighthouses cruise" (which just started five years ago) included, in this sequence:
New London Harbor Light.
New London Ledge Light.
Avery Point Light.
North Dumpling Light, which had the only jaeger of the trip.
Race Rock Light, in the very interesting waters of The Race.
Long Beach Bar (Bug) Light. The westernmost point in our roundtrip. Off south side of Orient NY.
Orient Point Light. *
Plum Island Light. * where we had a tern and fish feeding frenzy on Aug.4th.
Great Gull Island. * where I saw and photographed the adult Bridled Tern.
Little Gull Island Light. * after which this ship cuts across LIS for New London, CT.
where asterisk * indicates the most birds seen.
THE SHIP:
One major purpose for me was to evaluate this ship and its route, for birding, whale watching and marine surveys. More on that in a bit.
This is our extremely stable 3-deck catamaran, the Cecelia Ann...
Here we are on the top deck, pushing 37mph (groundspeed -- I measured it, with my GPS) into a headwind, going west in Gardiners Bay, two miles south of Plum Island...
This first photo is me facing forward, from my left rear corner perch (visibility straight forward is difficult [unless you are over six feet tall and can look over a high dark glass wind screen], although all other angles are good, making birding from the back of the top deck the best choice)...
and this second photo is me facing rearward (also showing the middle deck below, and Plum Island on the distant left)... this ship can fly...and it is super steady...
Here is the lowest of the three decks, in case of extreme weather, or anyone needs to nap in an airline type seat...
FROM NEW LONDON, CT:
CT birders can join one of TWO different lighthouse cruises, departing from New London CT (click to enlarge, and press ESC to return). Be aware that the Lights & Sights Cruise does NOT cross over to the Little Gull or Great Gull Islands! These trips are run during six months only, May through October:
FROM ORIENT POINT, NY:
NY birders can join a similar trip which begins at conveniently located Orient Pt, NY, the new "Long Island Lights Cruise" (click to enlarge, and press ESC key to return)...
Long Island Lights Cruise on News 12's The East End - YouTube
Unfortunately (I just heard about this) this ship could NOT sail on August 9th due to mechanical problems (and the same on August 10th). Passengers were refunded, and given $10 toward their next trip. This ship is expected to run on Saturday and Sunday, but given this situation, I would recommend calling ahead to make reservations...
More details on these 3 different "lighthouse cruises" are available here:
www.lighthouse.cruises
This (the "Classic Lighthouse Cruise") is a great route if you are interested in seabirds in general (it focuses mostly on NY waters and therefore, on NY birds). A lot of interesting NY locations are visited (80% of the time is in NY waters), including Race Rock, The Race waters, Little Gull, Great Gull, Plum Island and Orient Point. These are among the most interesting locations in Eastern Long Island Sound, for sure, and the birds and fish there can be exciting.
If you prefer to focus on CT only, then this is not that trip. BUT the alternate trip out of NewLondon, called "Lights & Sounds Cruise" route might be appealing, since it covers more CT waters, plus Race Rock, The Race waters, Little Gull Island, and presumably (I am verifying this now with the ferry company) Great Gull Island. Best of both worlds!
The ship has three levels. The top deck can seat about 100 people and has good visibility in most directions. This deck is always open to the public, even in bad weather. The middle deck has very good side and rear views. The lowest deck is glassed-in, but has good glass in front, so it could be used during extreme rain or other rough weather. I would give this ship an 8 or 9 out of ten rating, although its size may be a deterrent to some seabirds coming close to it.
Stability wise, it is tops. It runs dead flat in light waves, and I assume it will handle bigger seas well, similar to most big-engine catamarans.
WHAT IS NEXT?
Fasten your seatbelt -- I am negotiating with the ferry company, hoping we can do a charter cruise, to a place we all want to go, in comfort. Hopefully this will work. More in a few weeks!
ANOTHER POTENTIAL WAY TO GET TO THE BRIDLED TERN:
=================
Subject: Little Egret and Bridled Tern Boat Ride Services
Date: Thu Aug 9 2018 8:49 am
From: ctbirds AT lists.ctbirding.org
Hello everyone,
Last year I took many people to see the Bridled Tern out at Faulkner�s Island, and enjoyed it very much. I would like to offer my services to take people out to try and see both the Bridled Tern at Gull Island and the Little Egret off Stonington. I have a 17�6 boat and can take up to 4 passengers. Rate is $75/hour flat rate minimum 2 hours for the boat, not per person, for birding by boat. That works out to $40/person if 4 people go out for 2 hours. I have a trolling motor on my boat and able to quietly be near whatever we are watching at that moment. I supply ice and water in a cooler and a full tank of gas too. Just bring your optics and clothing suitable for the conditions.
I trailer my boat every time, so I am highly mobile. For the Little Egret, we would meet at Barn Island State Boat Ramp. For the Bridled Tern, we would meet at Niantic Waterford State Boat Ramp.
Best bet to contact me via my email: captain_ian@yahoo.com
Let me know ASAP, and good birding!
Capt Ian Devlin
East Norwalk, CT.
=================
Followed the next day Aug.10 by this heartening success story by Mike Resch and Capt. Ian Devlin...
=================
Subject: Success with the Bridled Tern
Date: Fri Aug 11 2018 6:25 am
From: Mike Resch
Tom -
I want to thank you for all your details about the Bridled Tern - I was successful in seeing it yesterday. The details in your blog gave me the impetus to give it a go yesterday, though it almost didn't happen. I had reached out to Captain Ian Devlin to try to arrange a trip but hadn't heard back from him. So I decided to take the Lighthouse Cruise on Friday, but then it was canceled. So then I resigned myself to just taking the 1 PM round-trip ferry ride to Orient Point and back, of course with little to no chance of seeing the Tern. But just as I was about to buy my ticket Ian called and said he would take me out.
We left from the Niantic River public boat ramp, and 20 minutes later arrived at the northeast portion of Great Gull Island. But after a few minutes of increasingly frantic searching there was no Bridled Tern in site. It quickly brought back most unhappy memories of my 2 failed attempts for this bird last summer. Just then all the terns took off from the island as a Peregrine buzzed the colony. I looked to the east and even without binocs quickly picked out the Bridled Tern in flight among hundreds of Commons. We both watched it for the next several minutes as it flew nearby, allowing for a few nice pictures. It briefly landed on a concrete structure just above the rocks at the northeast corner of the island, but then took off and we didn't spot it again over the next 45 minutes. Later we had a Parasitic Jaeger nearby (still in NY waters).
Here's a link to my eBird checklist with a couple photos -
https://ebird.org/view/
 |
| This photo by Mike Resch on August 10, 2018 around 4pm on Ian Devlin's boat near Great Gull Island, NY |
This capped off what was likely my best ever 2 consecutive days of birding in my 51-year birding career -
Thursday -
Great Black Hawk - Biddeford, ME
Neotropic Cormorant - Gorham, NH
Wood Stork - Rochester, NH
Friday -
Little Egret - Westerly, RI
Bridled Tern - Great Gull Island, NY
That's 5 extreme rarities, 2 of which were life birds, in 2 days.
Thanks again for your details and help in finding the Bridled Tern!
Mike Resch
www.statebirding.blogspot.com
Pepperell, MA
And Mike's trip was later summarized in his blog at this post: State Birding: Best 2 Days of Birding Ever, August 2018
=================
HISTORY:
There were many efforts in the last two years to visit and see this bird (perhaps the same bird?), in NY and CT waters. Here is just one of those memories...
31st July – Falkner Island, Guilford | Naturescape Images
