Among birders there’s something called “chasing a bird.” As I’ve written before, chasing a bird involves a birder learning of a rare or unusual bird — usually through social media — and quickly driving or flying to the location to try to see the bird and add it to their life list before it flies away.

As I recall, one of my very first columns for this paper involved my driving to Allegany State Park at a time when Quaker Lake had been emptied so that I could try and see a reported Hudsonian godwit that had been foraging in the mud. As it happened, the bird had flown by the time I got there so I wasn’t able to add it to my list of Cattaraugus County bird sightings. Nor have I been able to add it since that time since the bird requires good shorebird habitat, which is uncommon in our county.

But some people go great distances to catch a glimpse of a rare bird. Take, for example, the Steller’s sea eagle that was first recorded along the Denali Highway in Alaska in August 2020. From there, it was seen in Victoria, Texas in March 2021 before landing in Quebec, Canada in June 2021 and then showing up in Massachusetts in December 2021 — and Maine somewhat later.

The large size of the Steller’s sea eagle is said to dwarf the bald eagles that it associates with, and the fact that its native range is the Korean Peninsula and Japan, together with the estimate that there are fewer than 200 pairs remaining, helps explain why hundreds of people — birders and non-birders alike — turned out to see this bird whenever there was a sighting in the Northeast.

Some people traveled hundreds of miles chasing that bird and there’s no doubt that some of those people were disappointed when they got there because they were too late and the bird had flown away.

ON MOTHER’S DAY, a Cattaraugus County birder traveling across the Delaware Bay on the Cape May-Lewes Ferry photographed and was subsequently credited with recording only the second confirmed sighting of a streaked shearwater in the entire Atlantic Ocean with the first confirmed report coming in 2003 on a pelagic voyage out of Cape Town, South Africa.

Normally, the streaked shearwater is found only in the Pacific Ocean.

The Cape May-Lewes Ferry has been known for a long time as the low-rent birding alternative to the more expensive pelagic bird excursions in the area, but usually only after a strong low-pressure system moving up the East Coast has swept southern birds into the mouth of the Delaware Bay, which was not the case on Mothers’ Day.

And since southern New Jersey is a mecca for birders at any time of the year, we can be sure that the Ferry saw a surge of walk-on traffic following the report of the shearwater but, as far as I know, most were disappointed since the bird was not seen again.

As it happened, I left Cape May two days before the sighting of the shearwater after being in New Jersey for most of the week but I probably wouldn’t have chased the shearwater even if I had been there and had heard the report. Make no mistake, being credited with the first recorded sighting of a bird represents — if you’ll excuse the expression — a real feather in the cap of the birder who finds it, but the crowd-birding that can develop following a rare sighting doesn’t interest me.

And, aside from a “yard list” of birds that I’ve seen on my property, I’m no longer a lister.

For me, individual vagrants — as birds outside their normal range are called — like the Steller’s sea eagle or the streaked shearwater interest me less than large flocks of common birds, which is why I was in New Jersey in May. The Edwin Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge near Absecon, New Jersey is one of the few remaining federally protected salt marshes on the East Coast and, with an 8-mile auto tour route, it’s the only one that I’m aware of that is easily accessible by anything other than a boat.

I scheduled my trip in the hope — but not the expectation — that my arrival would coincide with the arrival of migrating shorebirds because they can number in the thousands, and seeing them explode off the surface of a tidal marsh is a thrilling experience, not to mention a thing of beauty.

I’ve been to the Forsythe refuge many times in the autumn, but being there in the spring was a new experience, partly because I was seeing birds in their breeding plumage rather than their dull post-breeding winter plumage. So, even common birds like the laughing gull looked resplendent in their breeding plumage — and black-bellied plovers were stunning.

For most of the visitors to the Refuge the attraction is the shorebirds, the wading birds and the pelagic birds that are easily seen and photographed from a vehicle, but there are also upland areas at Forsythe that are good for songbirds and turtles.

When I was there in early May a short list of the songbirds in the upland area included prairie warbler, white-eyed vireo, indigo bunting, Carolina chickadee, blue grosbeak and yellow-breasted chat.

In the tidal marsh areas along the auto tour route, willets and American oystercatchers were along the side of the road while great flocks of dunlin, short-billed dowitchers, black skimmers, greater and lesser yellowlegs, least sandpipers, semipalmated plovers, black-bellied plovers, herons and egrets could be seen in the marshy areas, while Forster’s terns, gull-billed terns, common terns and least terns could be seen whirling overhead with osprey, laughing gulls, herring gulls, bald eagles and the occasional peregrine falcon.

Seaside sparrows could be heard — but rarely seen — in the marsh grasses along the side of the road.

But it’s not just seeing the birds at Forsythe that makes it so special, it’s witnessing their behavior, whether it’s a Forster’s tern diving for a fish or a willet probing in the sand or a black skimmer skimming the surface of the water with its lower mandible or a bald eagle scattering a raft of waterfowl or getting into a tussle with an osprey over a disputed claim to a fish.

In short, the concentration of bird life at Forsythe makes it one of the premier destinations for birding on the East Coast and since the light is always changing and birds come and go, I often go through twice for a single small entrance fee.

And when I was there in November there were so few bugs that I actually cycled the 8-mile auto tour route after going through the first time in my vehicle.

Although I generally avoid crowd-birding, that’s virtually impossible in New Jersey in May and in the next column I’ll describe a very positive crowd-birding experience I had in Ocean City, New Jersey.

Images of some of the birds mentioned here can be seen at:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/meadowsteward/

(Jeffrey Reed writes a birding column for the Olean Times Herald. Readers with questions or comments can call him at 557-2327 or email him at jeffreed58@gmail.com.)