Some More Shorebird Photos

These are a few additional photos that I took on Saturday, but that did not fit into my post on shorebird banding yesterday. Up above, a group of Dunlin pause in the surf, with a Semipalmated Sandpiper standing by.

A Dunlin forages in the foreground while Red Knots stand in the surf.

A familiar trio from Reed's Beach: Red Knot, Laughing Gull, and Dunlin.

A Semipalmated Sandpiper picks through beach litter for morsels.

A Laughing Gull stands in the surf.

Speaking of Laughing Gulls, this is what Reed's Beach looked liked on Sunday morning. Cape May County has one of the largest Laughing Gull breeding areas in the world in its back bay marshes along the eastern side of the peninsula. Apparently a lot of those nests got flooded out in the last week because of recent high tides, made higher than normal by their proximity to the full moon on Tuesday. As a result, a lot of those gulls were hanging out in the horseshoe crab spawning areas along the Delaware Bay instead of tending to their nests in the marshes.