December 31, 2016

Last day of the year. We’re in Delaware for the holidays. Thus,
the Delaware centric Night Before Christmas post. Great food, good birding, Dogfish
Head brew pub, and the ocean. Things can’t get much better than that. But wait,
yes, they can. Ocean vistas, impressive gales, tides and waves, sunrises and
sunsets. Did I mention the ocean?

Cape Henlopen

Cape Henlopen

Cape Henlopen

Sunrise, Indian River inlet

Sunset, Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge

Molly came with us but flew back on Wednesday. We had to
take her to the Baltimore airport so we made a day out of it and hit the
National Aquarium at the Baltimore Inner Harbor. It cost $40 per person but was
worth every penny. It’s just plain impressive. Way beyond just fish in
aquariums. One display was jellyfishes. I could just about watch them all day
long.

Fish

Jellyfish

Jellyfish

Jellyfish

Jellyfish

We’ve been getting out and trying to up our yearly bird
species list a bit. Got some species like snow geese, gannet, brant, western sandpiper,
and purple sandpiper that range from difficult to almost impossible to get in
Michigan. Late in the game we found out about two species, ash-throated
flycatcher and created caracara that are rare to this area but have been sighted
recently. So today we went chasing and got them both. Only to find out when we
updated our list that we had seen crested caracara in Costa Rica last January. Lise
was even thinking about how common they were in Costa Rica while we were
driving all over the place looking for it. We were in good company though. We
pulled into one place that had cars with license plates from Delaware, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland,
and Ontario.