Pleasure Island Birds Return

It has been a really sparse year for birds!!  Usually by now I have seen tons of Oystercatchers and Marbled Godwits down at Ft. Fisher.  So far this year, I have only spotted one Oystercatcher at quite  a distance.  I hadn't seen anything, even the Mallards, at Carolina Beach Lake.  I suspect the horrendous hurricane and all the water has something to do with that.  The waterfall totals for this year have surpassed the record set in 1877 by almost 20 inches!!  Above are the pretty male Buffleheads which I saw at Carolina Beach Lake on a nice sunny day showing off their irredescence .

I have seen quite a few of the Royal Terns down at Ft. Fisher recently.

On a very rainy day, I spotted these Forster's Terns on the dock, both sleeping most of the time!!  One woke up for a minute.

One very sunny day, I spotted this Cooper's Hawk.  I misidentified it at first!

My husband kept saying he was seeing lots of ducks down by the gazebo at Ft. Fisher.  I told him they were probably Scoters as I have seen them every year down there.  I finally got over to see for myself and was greeted by a male and female Bluebird sitting on the roof!  Mr. Bluebird is prettier than his female counterpart.

At first all I saw were a group of female Black Scoters, but eventually two males flew in and joined the group.  I took nice closeups so I could show hubby the differences between the male and female Scoters.

The second male with his tale up!  The sun was shining off that yellow bill.

This is a female Black Scoter and there were lots of them as well as male and female Buffleheads.

We had noticed that we weren't even seeing the usual number of pelicans and that they were flying across the island in different places.  Yesterday I could no  longer say that.  There were huge numbers of them down by the rocks at Ft. Fisher with Herring Gulls and even my first Northern Gannet for the season.  They were all diving for fish which must have been schooling there!