#great black backed gulls

A few days ago I returned from an Actual Week’s Vacation!  A bunch of friends and I rented a beach house on Long Beach Island, NJ (where I partly grew up and where my Mom lived until only a few years ago). I hadn’t been back since Mom moved to assisted living, and I missed it.  You can rent houses real cheap in October – but in fact we had PERFECT weather. Warm but not hot, the ocean itself was 70 F (which is as warm as it really gets on the Jersey Shore). 

I took So Many Pics.  So many that I’ll be doing a second post tomorrow.

Here:

Sunset on the first day, from the upper deck.  (I don’t even know what was up with that almost woven effect in the clouds but it was spectacular.)

Bear Mountain Carousel in Bear Mountain State Park, NY.  (We drove through on our way down, and the Carousel was open and working, so we stopped. It features a bunch of local animals, and the entire thing with all the paintings is just gorgeous.)

The view from the deck off the living room.  Wonderful place to sit and watch and listen to the ocean, while having a cup of tea in the morning.  Or any time, really.  (Signs on the dunes say: Stay Off the Dunes, and Don’t Feed the Seagulls, lol.)

Would it be a trip to the shore without mini-golf? I think not!  Sand Trap, the mini-golf course of my youth, my beloved.  (It’s been redone a bit since the time when I was REALLY small, but is still wonderfully familiar.)

Only subjecting you to one of eight billion pics I took for identification purposes of sandpipers.  Conclusion: either spotted sandpipers (in fall/winter plumage) or semi-palmated sandpipers; need to do more investigation. In the foreground, a laughing gull starting into winter plumage (i.e. losing the distinctive black head.)  And, a great black-backed gull in flight.

(To be perfectly honest, I was not as avid a birder in my youth, so I thought all of the big gulls were herring gulls.  And we DID have a ton of those.  But there were a LOT of great black-backed gulls mixed in, and now I’m wondering how many we had there when I was younger and I just didn’t notice.  The most obvious difference is the color of the feathers on top – the very dark for the black-backed, obviously, while the herring gulls have much lighter-grey wings.  Easy to tell apart, now that I know.  Was I just unobservant before?)

Still to come: more sunsets!  And a lighthouse!