The candy store offerings increase during the spring and fall migrations. Because of its location along the Atlantic flyway, Cape May is a major stopover for migrating birds. The passerines typically start appearing in early September and the migration parade lasts into November. Warblers and the first of the raptors, mostly broadwings, fill the sky. While Higbee’s Beach near Cape May Point is an excellent place to gorge on magnolias, black-throated blues and other types of warblers, it’s also a great place to catch kestrels, merlins, sharp-shinned hawks and Cooper’s hawks snapping up dragonflies and other insects in flight over the fields.
The “official” hawk watch platform is located at Cape May Point, to the left of the lighthouse in the Cape May State Park. The platform has grown from its humble beginning as a lifeguard’s stand manned by only a few dedicated counters in the late 1970s. Today, it’s a large, 2-level platform that is wheelchair accessible. Benches lining the sides of the platforms offer a modicum of comfort for birders who find themselves glued for hours to their binoculars and spotting scopes, watching the passerine parade.
One of my favorite places to bird in Cape May is The Meadows, a Nature Conservancy property located ocean-side. A sandy trail loops around two meadows and the shore. You get a little bit of everything in The Meadows, from warblers and cedar waxwings to green herons, American and least bitterns, Great egrets, cattle egrets, snowy egrets, the occasional sora, the obligatory mute swan and mallard, the random saw-whet owl, and much, much more. Piping plovers nest and breed on the beach-side section of the trail, in a section of dune that is roped off so passersby don’t step on the tiny fledglings. The beach at low tide offers a host of shorebirds from ruddy turnstones to semipalmated plovers. Scan the waters, and you just might get a glimpse of shearwaters and other pelagics.
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