Cape May, New Jersey
Its fame is founded on the spectacle of fall migration, when birds heading south along the East Coast are funneled by geography to a peninsular point. And the concentrations of hawks and songbirds can be awesome — fallouts that match the best of High Island, Texas, or Point Pelee, Ontario; annual hawk flights twice the tally at celebrated Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania.
But the most tantalizing thing about Cape May is not massed spectacles. It is not even the often fulfilled promise of finding something uncommon (as the checklist total of 388 species attests). The real allure of Cape May is consistency. No place in North America offers more spectacles and more possibilities more consistently.
A million migrating shorebirds gather in the area each May to feed on the horseshoe crabs that beach themselves to breed — a world-class phenomenon. Fall migration begins in June, and come August, waves of migrants are as regular as cold fronts.
At Higbee Beach, 100,000 warblers (mostly yellow-rumped) have been counted in a morning. From the seabird watch, 600,000 birds have been counted in a season. At Cape May's hawk watch, 21,800 hawks have been counted in a single day! And late every afternoon in October, at The Nature Conservancy's Cape May Migratory Bird Refuge, peregrine falcons and merlins hunt the flats.
Birds you might see
- Peregrine falcon
- Merlin
- Cooper’s hawk
- Sharp-shinned hawk
- Red knot
- Ruddy turnstone
- Dunlin
- Sanderling
- Semipalmated sandpiper
- Whimbrel
Top 10 Birding Spots was compiled by Pete Dunne who is the director of the New Jersey Audubon Society's Cape May Bird Observatory and author of "Tales of a Low Rent Birder," "Feather Quest" and "Before the Echo."
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Photo: Black skimmer skimming the waters at The Nature Conservancy's Cape May, NJ reserve. Photo © David Maher; Red knot. Photo © Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART
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