White Ibis, Old Lyme, CT, August 2014

Denny Abbott and I had tried unsuccessfully for a White Ibis in Stratford, CT a couple years ago.  Although every miss is disappointing, that one was particularly frustrating as we were within 100 yards of the bird and didn’t know it.  We were looking at a pond on the south side of a warehouse near the coast while the bird was actually being seen in a pond we didn’t even know existed on the north side of that building.  It made for a pretty depressing ride home after that trip.  So when news of an immature bird in Old Lyme was posted to the listserve, I was itching to go.  And with another White Ibis I saw in NH a few days earlier, that gave us 2 in New England at the same time.

The listserve posts were not too detailed, and in fact the first two mentioned it was in Hawk’s Nest Marsh but did not give a road name.  But with a fair amount of additional research I eventually figured out that the bird was seen in the morning and evening in the marsh along West End Drive, especially associating with Snowy Egrets.  And one post mentioned that the bird was first spotted two days earlier.  That same birder posted his sighting on e-bird and mentioned the earlier sighting was from Otter Rock Road.  I looked at the tide tables and realized that there were morning and evening high tides at the time, so maybe the bird was most likely at West End Drive at high tides.  Or maybe that was just coincidence as there were no posts (positive or negative) from the middle of the day during lower tides.  Given our recent experience with the White Ibis in NH, I wondered if this bird too might disappear in channels at lower tides, and therefore would be easiest to spot at higher tides.  Going on that theory, I called Denny and we planned to head to West End Drive during the afternoon/evening the next day during the high tide.

We arrived at West End Drive mid-afternoon with a low but rising tide.  We quickly realized that the marsh near West End Drive was actually mostly salt pannes, likely not affected by the tides.  There was considerable Spartina marsh farther out, complete with a number of channels lined by brush.  So now my theory was starting to come together – perhaps the bird was seen along West End Drive in the salt pannes at high tide when there was no other habitat for it to feed in elsewhere in the marsh.  And at lower tides it would prefer to feed in the channels, likely out of view – just like the NH bird we saw a few days earlier.

We scanned the marsh and pannes and saw no waders at all.  Several active Osprey nests were nice to watch, as were a couple Saltmarsh Sparrows, but there were no waders.  At one point a flock of 14 dark ibises flew overhead – but no White Ibis was in the flock.  After about 45 minutes of scanning, and with a tide that was still pretty low, I suggested to Denny that we drive up to Otter Rock Road to see if the bird might be in the marsh there.  We could always come back to West End Drive later as the tide got higher.

Otter Rock Road runs along the western edge of the upper reaches of Hawk’s Nest Marsh, with houses on one side and the marsh at the edge of the road on the other side.  Although there was a lot of brush along the edge, we found a couple places to look out into the marsh, which was mostly Spartina with some large pools.  One Great Egret was standing exposed in the marsh, but we saw nothing else.  Then I noticed the head of a Snowy Egret appear at the top of a deep channel, then disappear, then appear once more.  If an all-white Egret could hide in the channel, then a mostly brown immature Ibis could certainly go unnoticed there.  Our level of optimism was definitely increasing.  I walked a short distance away to check out another vantage point and when I returned Denny mentioned he had just gotten a brief glimpse of a dark wader with some white plumage.  And just a few seconds later, the White Ibis popped into view.  For the next 15 minutes the bird continued to feed in the marsh, at times disappearing into the channels, then briefly coming back into view.  And all the time it was very closely associating with the Snowy Egret.  I was able to take several pretty nice phone-scoped photos.

 

Good thing I did all that detective work researching the places where the bird had been seen.  And it looked like my theory for how the tide might affect its movements might have been pretty accurate.

That was number 311 for me in CT, and my fourth New England state with White Ibis.