[va-bird] Birding in and around tidal waters

Recent posting on gulls brought this to mind--

Thought I'd throw out a useful web-link for those interested in 
gulls/shore/water/marsh birds in and around our tidal waters.  The link below 
generates high/low tide, sunrise/sunset and moon phase for any location in the 
U.S.  (My link generates data for Alexandria-Bell Haven stretch of the Potomac, 
but you can select any site you like and any dates you like--just surf around 
the web site and you'll be able to figure it out).

The extremely low tides (minus tides from the mean water level/ zero tide 
level) that coincide with sunrise and sunset often generate a significant 
amount of feeding activity due to the exposure of normally water covered 
features.  You can get in some great birding in the right locations if you pick 
a good morning/evening coupled with a really low tide.  Mud flat exposure at 
Bell Haven is  10-100X greater during good minus tides.

The very high tides are particularly useful during the Spring and Summer months 
when reclusive marsh birds are present, but hard to spot due to their habits 
and thick vegetation.  High tides inundate normally dry areas forcing birds 
that hang out in the lower marshy areas out of their hiding spots.  This is 
especially true of the early and mid-Spring high tides which seem catch some of 
the newly arrived breeding birds occupying low real estate off guard.  

 Figuring out the low tides is pretty easy--just look for the minus signs in 
the tables.  The high water is a little harder to figure out--just look at a 
month's worth of data and you'll be able to pick out the really high tides.

For those who want to print the data I recommend cutting/pasting the info into 
a word processing program and manipulating as you see fit--printing from the 
web site is painfully inefficient.
 
http://tbone.biol.sc.edu/tide/tideshow.cgi?site=Alexandria%2C+Virginia

'Time and tide wait for no man'  --some guy in a boat on the Thames River c. 
1450

Good luck,
Jim

James W.McNulty
605 Jefferson St, Unit 201
Alexandria, VA  22314
703-566-9520

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