This trip begins with an arrival at the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, airport. Those who arrive early enough can enjoy birding at the nearby John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge. Woodlands and wetlands here offer

some excellent birding in this very urban setting. We are here during spring migration, so a large assortment of songbirds is possible, with a dozen or more species of warblers to be expected. Around the lake you may see Wood Duck, Great Egret, Osprey, Bald Eagle, Tree Swallow and Marsh Wren.

The first full day begins looking for woodland-nesting species in western New Jersey. We'll have many opportunities to find songbirds during this trip, but our list will already be growing nicely when we leave the forest and arrive at the coast of Delaware Bay. Now we will begin adding large numbers of shorebirds, gulls, terns, waders and waterfowl. Many birders will be in the area at this time, and rare bird alerts will be checked regularly to see if we need to chase anything

unusual.

The Cape May area offers a large assortment of wonderful sites for birding, and we will spend the next few days visiting as many of them as we can, building our list to between 125 and 150 species. We will enjoy a two-hour cruise on the coastal marshes. Several species of birds are much easier to see from this

boat than from other vantage points around the area. Off the southern point of Cape May, the rough water often attracts pelagic species like shearwaters, storm-petrels and jaegers.

We stay four nights at the same hotel near Cape May, so there is not a lot of travel time, or changing of hotels, on this trip–just more and more birding!