Labor Day empties Avalon out fast. The rental turnovers stop, the bike racks in front of the market thin out, and by the third week of September you can walk down 21st Street without waiting for a golf cart to pass. Most of the town treats this as the quiet stretch before winter.
At the beach between 8th and 9th Streets, it is the opposite. A counter with binoculars and a scope has been showing up there every day since 1993, logging birds from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week, in whatever weather shows up. This is the Avalon Seawatch, run by New Jersey Audubon's Cape May Bird Observatory, and it runs from September 22 through December 22 regardless of how few cars are left on Dune Drive.
The thing most residents don't clock is that this isn't a modest little count for hobbyists. It's one of the largest single-point waterbird surveys on the Atlantic coast, and the number behind it is worth sitting with: an average of roughly 750,000 to 800,000 seabirds pass that stretch of beach every fall, with some years topping a million. In a recap published in early 2024, Cape May Bird Observatory noted the count had just crossed a million birds for only the third time since it began in 1993. That's not a rounding error. It's the town's biggest annual traffic event, just measured in wings instead of cars, and it happens in the weeks everyone assumes Avalon has gone still.
Why This Particular Stretch Of Beach Does The Work
The location wasn't picked for convenience. New Jersey Audubon selected the beach between 8th and 9th Streets because Avalon's northern tip extends about a mile farther out into the Atlantic than the coastline to the north, just south of Townsend's Inlet. Southbound seabirds hugging the coast get funneled in close as they round that point, which means the counter isn't guessing at distant specks through a scope. Loons, scoters, gannets, cormorants, jaegers, gulls, terns, and a long list of others pass close enough to identify, sometimes by the thousands in a single hour.
That geography is also why nobody built the counting shack somewhere with a parking lot and a bathroom. The birds don't care about amenities. They care about the shape of the coastline, and Avalon happens to sit at the one bend on this stretch of the Jersey Shore where that shape does the concentrating for you.
The Five Weeks That Actually Carry The Season
Here's the number that changes how you'd plan a visit if you were inclined to go: roughly 70 percent of the entire fall flight passes in about five weeks, from around October 7 through November 14. The rest of the ten-week season, spread across late September and all of December, accounts for the remaining 30 percent.
That means the "quiet season" everyone associates with Avalon in the fall has its own internal rush hour, and it's a short one. If you've lived here for years and never once walked down to the seawatch shack, mid-October is the actual window, not a vague gesture toward "sometime in the fall."
What that window looks like in practice, though, isn't a steady stream. It's wildly uneven day to day, which is part of what makes the counter's log worth reading. Here's one real week from the archives, the week of October 7 through 19, 2021, not because it was typical but because it wasn't:
| Date (Oct. 2021) | What moved through | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Oct. 7 | Black Scoters, first big push of the season | 750 |
| Oct. 8 | Brown Pelicans, single-day record for the count | 121 |
| Oct. 9 | Laughing Gulls / Double-crested Cormorants | 3,249 / 3,639 |
| By Oct. 19 | Brown Pelicans, season total to date | 700+ |
Four days, four completely different stories. That unevenness is the season. A morning with fog and light wind can produce barely a thousand birds. A cold front with the right northwest wind behind it can push tens of thousands through before lunch.
What The Record Book Looks Like
One of New Jersey Audubon's season wrap-ups for the count gives a sense of how far the numbers can swing in either direction for individual species. That season's notable counts included 25 Harlequin Ducks, a record for the site and well above the previous high of 13 set in 2009, alongside 492 Brown Pelicans, the second-highest total on record behind 635 in 2009, and 4 Brown Booby, also a record.
Harlequin Duck: 25, a record count, previous high of 13 in 2009. Black-legged Kittiwake: 39, second-highest count, record is 201 in 1996. Razorbill: 382, second-highest count, record is 3,262 in 2018.
That last line is worth pausing on. A single-species record of 3,262 Razorbills in one season, set in 2018, is the kind of number that sounds invented until you remember this count has been running for over three decades and every single day of it gets logged.
The Rest Of Seven Mile Island's Fall Calendar
The seawatch isn't the only piece of this. A few miles down the island, the Wetlands Institute in Stone Harbor runs its own overlapping fall programs, and Avalon residents are part of the reason some of them exist in the first place. The Institute worked with both Boroughs to build native wildlife gardens, including one right in Avalon at Armacost Park, along with plantings at the Stone Harbor Bird Sanctuary and a wildflower meadow at 118th Street and Dune Drive. Several of these plantings are certified Monarch Waystations through Monarch Watch, giving migrating monarch butterflies a place to refuel with milkweed and late-season nectar plants on their way to Mexico. The Institute also runs a volunteer Monarch Ambassador program that trains people to tag butterflies as part of the same continent-spanning tracking effort that's been running since the 1940s.
The Institute has had a busy year on other fronts too. In February 2026, it was awarded a $3,075,000 grant through New Jersey's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative Natural Climate Solutions program to fund a Salt Marsh Trail Revitalization project. Around the same time, it wrapped construction on a marsh restoration effort at Scotch Bonnet Island, done in partnership with the Army Corps of Engineers and the state's Fish and Wildlife team.
And in May 2026, the Institute's team of staff birders, known for years as the Marshketeers, competed in New Jersey Audubon's World Series of Birding. Over roughly 20 hours they covered 183 miles, logged 16,795 steps, and identified 133 species, closing the day at an Upper Township rookery with a Marsh Wren as their bonus bird. That year's event drew 81 teams statewide, with the winning Mega team finding 211 species across the full state. It's a reminder that the same institutions quietly tracking monarchs and marsh restoration on this island are also the ones out there racking up county and state birding records every spring.
If You Actually Want To Go Look
You don't need equipment or expertise to stand at the seawatch shack and watch a scoter flight go by. A few practical notes for anyone who's lived here for years and never bothered:
- The count site sits on the beach between 8th and 9th Streets, just south of Townsend's Inlet.
- It runs sunrise to sunset, every day, from September 22 through December 22.
- Mid-October through the first two weeks of November is the highest-percentage window if you only have a few mornings to spare.
- Bring binoculars if you have them. A pair of naked eyes still works fine for the bigger flights.
- Cold, clear mornings after a wind shift out of the northwest tend to produce the heaviest movement.
None of this requires planning around a rental calendar or a beach tag. It's one of the few things on this island that gets better precisely when the crowds leave.
If you've spent years on Seven Mile Island and are only now hearing that a shack at 8th Street quietly logs one of the largest bird counts on the Atlantic coast every fall, you're not alone. Most of what makes Avalon worth living in year-round doesn't show up in a rental listing. For questions about the island, its seasons, or anything property-related once you're ready to talk, Joseph Butler has spent 23 years selling here and 30 as a year-round resident. Let's Connect.
