In the last column, I wrote about birders “chasing a bird,” which means going out of our way to see a rare or unusual bird. I wrote that chasing a rare bird no longer interested me partly because of the crowd-birding that develops as more and more people travel to see a rarity.

No sooner had that column appeared than I was tempted to chase a rare bird that showed up at the Edwin Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey where I had been three weeks earlier.

So much for no longer chasing rare birds!

Situated as it is on the Atlantic Ocean, rare or unusual birds are frequently showing up at Forsythe and this time it was a scissor-tailed flycatcher, and judging by the pictures that birders were posting on social media, the bird was both close to the wildlife drive and very cooperative with photographers.

While the bird isn’t rare on its breeding grounds in the central and southern Great Plains, it’s very rare on the East Coast.

What stands out about the scissor-tailed flycatcher is how well adapted it is to the prairie environment where it uses its extraordinarily long tail as a rudder while hawking insects in the stiff prairie winds. There are other species of flycatchers in the prairies but it’s the scissor-tailed that captures the imagination and defines that landscape for me.

Years ago when I was still photographing birds with film, I was in a bird blind in Kansas photographing prairie chickens when a scissor-tailed flycatcher landed on a fence nearby and I was able to squeeze off a shot before the bird flew. But the juxtaposition of this graceful flycatcher perched on a gnarly barbed wire fence with steel posts has motivated me since that time to try to get a better photograph — and the bird at Forsythe was that opportunity.

Admittedly, the thought of driving back to New Jersey after having just been there three weeks earlier made me pause. Plus, the weather forecast was calling for days of rain — no surprise there — and the thought of standing in the rain with a crowd of other people waiting to get the perfect shot of a vagrant flycatcher also made me pause.

As it happened, the bird made the decision for me since I waited too long and it flew away to parts unknown. Perhaps all the excitement on the East Coast convinced it to return to the slower pace of the wide-open prairie in Kansas.

THE TRUTH IS, even though I don’t enjoy crowd-birding, speaking with other birders about what they’ve been seeing is a very good way to learn about an area, particularly if they live there, and that’s what happened when I was birding at The Nature Conservancy’s property called The South Cape May Meadows.

I had spent a couple of days at the Meadows stalking yellow-breasted chats that I had heard but not seen. There were at least three individual birds and I was hoping to get a photograph of one of them and so were numerous other photographers.

Yellow-breasted chats are in the family Parulidae and the genus Icteria, but they’re larger than most other warblers and their song is loud enough that even I can hear it, but they’re very secretive so it’s not unusual to hear one close by in dense shrubbery but never actually see it.

And since the male is most vocal in the early spring, if you don’t get it at that time you may never get it even though it’s nesting close by. As far as I know, there has never been a confirmed nesting in Cattaraugus County although Dr. Stephen Eaton called it a “possible” nester.

I decided that my best chance at getting a photograph was to sit on a bench near the most vocal of the three birds and just wait and hope for the best. But a birder with a camera in the Meadows attracts other birders and before long there were eight of us hoping for a look at the bird and swapping stories while we waited.

One of the people in the group began talking about a heronry they’d visited in Ocean City, N.J. half an hour up the coast from Cape May and I made a mental note of the location, which they said was visible from the Ocean City Welcome Center.

Birders can be a gregarious lot and as we waited other people joined us and then someone whispered “There it is!” Sure enough, while we were chatting, the yellow-breasted chat made a very brief appearance in perfect light at the top of the bush and half a dozen cameras took aim and twice that many binoculars. I’d need to wait until I uploaded the images onto my laptop but it appeared to have been a successful stakeout.

But as a bird photographer, I wasn’t holding out much hope for the heronry in Ocean City.  I had been to a heronry near Cape May once before and the birds were distant, the light was poor and the setting was an old dock which I found aesthetically unappealing. Plus, I had parked on the sand where fishermen had parked before setting off for the heronry and when I returned, the fishermen were gone and the tide was coming in and the water was up to the hubcaps on my vehicle. Lesson learned.

I arrived at the Ocean City Welcome Center the next morning just as the fog was lifting and after parking my car, walked over to where I saw other people standing. Since I wasn’t optimistic, I’d left my camera in the car but as I reached the overlook, I was stunned by how close the birds were and hurried back for my camera.

There, just below eye level, were more yellow-crowned night herons, black-crowned night herons, great egrets, snowy egrets and white ibises than I had ever seen in one location.  Some were tending to eggs in their nests while others were walking gingerly along the branches of trees and still others were carrying nest material all within 50 yards of traffic whizzing to and from Ocean City at highway speed. The concentration of wading birds of several different species nesting communally on this island that was no bigger than a football field — and probably smaller — was incredible.

FROM A BIRDER’S perspective it was as though I had entered a fairy tale and from a photographer’s perspective it didn’t get any better — or easier — to photograph birds.   Structurally, the Welcome Center itself is very impressive with walkways leading down to the water level where a paved path snaked along under the highway and past the heronry. That’s where the fairy tale ended as the smell of dead and rotting fish overwhelmed the senses and I settled for the view from the parking area above.  The entire experience was unforgettable.

The recovery of birds of prey such as the bald eagle, the osprey and the peregrine falcon following the banning of DDT is well known. Less well known is the ongoing recovery of wading birds that were killed by the tens of thousands for their feathers that were used in fashionable women’s hats during the so-called Gilded Age before World War I.

For birders and non-birders alike, the Ocean City heronry provides hope for their continued recovery.

Images of some of the 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.)