eBird is an exciting tool and is the present and future of birding. Its deficiency is with the past. It will be a great boon to avian research if everyone enters his or her entire birding database into eBird. This will create the complete history of birding at the touch of a qwerty keyboard or the swipe of an iPad. This writer is as guilty as anyone for not practicing what he preaches. There are close to thirty years of notepads and scraps of paper sitting in boxes and years worth of AviSys data for me to go through. I await the magic export/import button to sort all of it and enter it into eBird.

There were twenty Great Egrets at Melanie Lane Pond, in Hanover Township this morning. The previous high this year was eleven. eBird states the previous all-time high in Morris County was twelve. Who is to know? Is there another repository other than eBird? Records of NJ Birds? It is a great resource but besides some issues on the New Jersey Audubon web site, it is not searchable. I am new school – give me a search engine, please. Time is short and my patience thin for sifting through all of that.

Therefore, as it stands, a new record for the number of Great Egrets in one sighting at one place in Morris County was set today: 20. Period. eBird says so. Get your records in there, people!

Also at Melanie Lane Pond were 5 Great Blue Herons, 2 Green Herons, 2 Spotted Sandpipers and the resident 6 Killdeer. The morning’s 3 Least Sandpipers grew to 10 in the afternoon (Thanks, Jamie). These represent the first peep of the summer 2012 season in Morris County.

The view of the pond from Mount Melanie (a presumed landfill).

Great Egrets at Melanie Lane Pond.

One of the many juvenile Great Blue Herons hangin’ at the pond in the last few weeks.

(Photos by J. Klizas)

Yesterday, Jamie Glydon was able to get the following picture of Chatham’s adult Black-crowned Night-Heron. This is the first known adult record for Morris County in 2012. The other reports from the Great Swamp and Melanie Lane Pond were of immature Night-Herons.

(Photo by J. Glydon)