Kate Ruskin of the New Jersey Audubon Society reports that a banded Harbor Heron was spotted in the Meadowlands on Monday:

One of our NJAS volunteers, Mary Jo Marino, spotted a banded Snowy Egret in Mill Creek Marsh [Monday] morning.  She spotted an individual with a blue band that read "2D" and after a volley of emails in a matter of hours (thanks Mary Jo for the prompt notification!), Susan Elbin of NYCA reports the following:

"SNEG tagged '2D' was banded on Hoffman Island on 8 June 2010.  The bird was banded as a pre-fledgling, so it's a young of the year.  According to Mary Jo, 2D spent quite a while foraging in OWA [open water above the knee]."

This is the second sighting of a SNEG banded on Hoffman in the Meadowlands this season.  Also keep an eye out for yellow  bands, which mark birds tagged on South Brother Island. (Thanks, Kate, Mary Jo and Susan!)

Note: We checked for the bird on our lunch hour Tuesday, when we took the photo above. We did not see the bird despite looking in several of the impoundments.

For future reference, we are posting a downloadable map of Mill Creek Marsh. If you see a great bird, like Kevin Bolton's American Golden Plover or Mary Jo's banded SNEG, you can download the map, denote digitally where you saw the bird, and then e-mail us here — we'll post it on the blog so others know where to start looking for it.

Download it here:

Click here and then click "save image as"

Previous posts on the Harbor Herons Project are here.