Birding at the End of the World

On Saturday, the world was going to end and the righteous among us were to ascend bodily to Heaven. Since we figured we wouldn't be going, we decided to try birding at Cedar Key instead.

It's a good thing we did, too: the birding was great. Not amazing fallout day great, but quite good for a day at the tail end of an unusually slow spring migration.

We weren't expecting much. But we did know of a spot where a good sighting was almost guaranteed: the Cedar Key Scrub Preserve, where we found three Florida Scrub-Jays in the exact same place where we saw them (or their cohorts) on our last few visits.

It would be more precise to say the Scrub-Jays found us. "Isn't that a Scrub-Jay?" our friend Elizabeth asked, pointing at a backlit bird on top of a tree about 50 feet away. Before we could answer, the bird swooped down--and landed on a bush right by the trail! His friends soon followed. Yup, it was a Scrub-Jay!

We spent about half an hour enjoying their company (and not seeing much else) before taking off to Shell Mound, part of the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge. I brought my spotting scope in hope of getting some good shorebirds, but we only saw the usual suspects: Willets, Semipalmated Plovers, and Ruddy Turnstones.

Once we got to Cedar Key proper, we noticed a Kingbird working the trees and utility poles right by the lot where we parked. I figured it was just an Eastern Kingbird -- I haven't seen one in a while and even "easy" flycatchers throw me -- but I never remembered them having such large bills:

Elizabeth pulled out her ever-present Sibley guide and I was happy to realize I was wrong: it was a Gray Kingbird, a bird that almost never appears in Gainesville, but does show up occasionally at Cedar Key. Even better, we soon found, there were TWO of them.

We saw both of them dash repeatedly in and out of a tree in the parking lot, which led to another discovery: they weren't only hanging out there, they were NESTING there! It was a life bird for Glenn, and a very cooperative one at that.

While in the parking lot, we ran into a birder who said he had seen a family of Great Horned Owls roosting in the cemetery a few weeks earlier. After a break for (a very tasty) lunch, we headed there and started looking into the trees.

No owls. But Elizabeth spotted a late Blackpoll Warbler, and we watched flocks of fledgling Northern Cardinals chasing their parents around the headstones, begging for food. We stood there and considered the striking juxtaposition between those energetic new little lives and the silence of the long-gone ones memorialized just underfoot.

Our best sighting came near the end of our day. While on the boardwalk overlooking the water by the cemetery, we saw a large vulture fly by. Only it wasn't a vulture: it was flying fast over the water, rising higher into the air until it disappeared over the cemetery. Its flight and wing shape and color were wrong for a vulture, it had the head and beak of a hawk, but it wasn't one of our usual suspects--what was it?

Glenn managed to get off a quick documentary shot:

Elizabeth pulled out her Sibley guide again, and then we had an answer: the closest thing our bird resembled in the book was a dark-morph Short-tailed Hawk -- an uncommon bird for this area. Back home, we e-mailed the picture to some expert local birders who confirmed our guess and told us that a pair of them had been nesting nearby at Shell Mound. Our third great hyper-local bird of the day.

It was too good a day for the world to end.

Picture This

As always, I had some excellent adventures over the weekend. But I have not a picture to show for it. If you will, try to imagine why.

Picture this: It's 6:20 a.m. on Sunday morning, and I have just pulled into the parking lot of Gainesville's Target: this is the meeting place for Alachua Audubon's trip to Cedar Key. When I had gotten up an hour earlier, I checked online to find there was a 60% chance of rain and thunderstorms that would last throughout the day. Any sensible person would have gone back to bed. But I'm not a sensible person.

6:35 a.m: I return from the restroom at a nearby gas station to find that I am one of the drivers for the trip (the reason for the rendezvous at Target was for us to consolidate into carpools and arrange rides). I load my passengers, who I already know—a fellow UF faculty member and another local birder—into my embarrassingly dirty car and we take off, just as the rain starts.

7:00 a.m.: Our first stop is supposed to be at the Scrub Jay reserve just outside Cedar Key. But the rest of the caravan is nowhere in sight—I had gotten stuck behind a traffic light on the way out and the others are now WAY in front of me. Probably looking at Florida Scrub Jays. But my car is old and weak, and the road between Gainesville and Cedar Key is a bit of a speed trap, so I drove conservatively. My UF colleague, in the catbird seat, assures me that the guy in front of us drives like a maniac, so losing him was kind of predictable.

7:45—We pull into the Scrub Jay reserve just as the others are returning to their cars. They didn't see any Scrub Jays. Thank goodness. Otherwise, I would have felt awful. Even more awful than I already felt about fulfilling everyone's worst stereotypes about slow Asian drivers.

8:00—We're at the side of the road off the first bridge leading into Cedar Key, looking at a bold, brightly colored, and perversely cooperative Nelson's Sharp-tailed Sparrow (or whatever this bird is officially called now...). All of us who had brought cameras are hitting ourselves upside the head. Why? It was raining cats and dogs, so we had all left our gear in our cars. Meanwhile, that sparrow—whose buffy head and breast shone orange in the tiny bit of sunlight peeking through the rain clouds—just sat there, as if daring us to bring our cameras out into the rain. Bastard.

8:20—The 10 or so field trip participants are huddled under a picnic shelter by the beach, resigned to our Big Day being more like a rainy Big Sit—or more accurately, a Big Soak. "Okay, did anyone bring a deck of cards?" our trip leader said only half jokingly. Still, we manage to rack up about 20 species.

8:45—We caravan to Cedar Key's tiny airport, where a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher had been lingering a few weeks before. It's still raining buckets. As soon as we arrive, our trip leader debarks from his car and tells each of the other drivers that we're going to Shell Mound—with luck, the rain will have stopped by time we get there.

9:00—It's still raining torrents at Shell Mound. Our trip leader reluctantly scotches the whole trip. Everyone gets back in their cars and heads eastward back to Gainesville.

9:15—My UF colleague in the front seat is clearly unhappy, and growing unhappier by the moment as Cedar Key receded into our rear-view mirror. I ask him if he wants to go back to Cedar Key and wait until the rain let up. He wanted to go back to Shell Mound instead, which we did. We passed several other field trip participants heading home as we reversed course. They must have thought we were crazy.

9:30—Miraculously, there was a break in the storm and we were in business. At Shell Mound, we lingered on the boardwalk overlooking a sandbar and reed-filled area, and found a number of birds everyone else had missed: White Pelicans, Clapper Rails, Marsh Wrens, Marbled Godwits, and a Wilson's Plover. There were also yet more Nelson's Sharp-tailed Sparrows and several Bald Eagles out in the distance. But the clouds lingered ominously overhead, and we left our cameras in the car.

11:00—The clouds darkened again, and we got into the car just as the rain started to fall again. On the way back, my passengers insisted that I stop for gas, even though I had 3/4 of a tank left; they paid for the fill.

12:00—Back at Target, the skies are clearing and the sun is starting to shine though the clouds. My friend in the front seat declares that he is going to Hague Dairy, since the skies to the north of us look clear. The poor birder in the back seat, who has said scarcely a word over the course of the whole trip, is no doubt relieved to be free of us.

1:30—A particularly intelligent squirrel has figured out how to feed off my "squirrel-proof" bird feeder. It's now stopped raining, and I have my camera out to catch him (or her) in the act. But the squirrel has had its fill and doesn't return.

But it was still pretty cool when it was there. And when that sparrow was there at Cedar Key. And those Clapper Rails. You just have to trust me on this.

Oh Wow! A Real Live Bird!

It was sunrise, and the Red-shouldered Hawk was in his usual tree by the boat deck at Powers Park. And he wasn't going anywhere.

Back in California, Glenn had struggled to get close-up shots of Red-shouldered Hawks. The ones we saw were always tiny rufous specks off in the distance, and skittish ones at that—if you lifted a lens in their direction 100 yards away, they'd see you and be off before you could even focus.

But not this guy. We'd seen him in that same tree, in that same spot, several weeks in a row, looking down at us disdainfully. When he wasn't in that tree, he was on the ground, only feet away. Or maybe in a nearby tree. This would have made for a perfect photo opportunity. Except for one thing.

Glenn didn't have his big lens with him, and we weren't there to take pictures. It was the Fall Migration Count, and we were there to count birds.

And thanks to our bad-ass buteo, there wasn't a songbird to be found anywhere in Powers Park. We could hear Tufted Titmice and Cardinals in the distance, and a few woodpeckers darted in and out, but no migrants were to be found. I heard a far-away Northern Parula, and a more intrepid member of our six-man/woman/child team bushwacked his way into the brush on the edge of the park and found a Kentucky Warbler, but that was it.

This had to be the lamest migration count ever. And it would only get worse.

After about three hours of hopeful but futile searching at Powers, we moved on to Gum Root Swamp, which was indeed swampy—so much so that we found ourselves stomping around in about 4 inches of brackish water for most of our time there. There, we found a couple of Yellow-billed Cuckoos, an Eastern Wood-pewee, a single American Redstart, and a Black-and-white Warbler—and, apart from a few other year-round residents, not much else. It's really sad when singles of such relatively common birds are the highlight of your count.

Then it was back to Powers Park for our lunch break. Our depressed team leaders drank beer with lunch and hoped things would improve in the afternoon. They didn't.

I've always thought that a frustrating fact about birding in Florida is that many of the bugs are as big as birds, and bird-like movements all too often turn out to be butterflies or grasshoppers. This bad photo shows how perversely large the invertebrates are out here in proportion to other critters—this spider actually has a baby gecko stuck in his web!

All at once now: Eew! Gross!

At least this was something interesting to look at. As was this Green Anole: they are native to the area, but are being pushed out by invasive Brown Anoles:

Our afternoon birding somehow managed to be even less productive than our morning attempts. But on Sunday was another day, and I spent it birding once again. A quick morning power walk through Bolen Bluff yielded a bold Ovenbird right by the trailhead, several Baltimore Orioles, a Summer Tanager, and a tree with about half a dozen Northern Parulas.

I was sure there was more to be found in there, but my time was limited: Glenn and I had reservations for Alachua Audubon's boat trip at Cedar Key. Here we enjoyed the ocean breeze and sightings of dozens of American Oystercatchers and other shorebirds:

This compensated (sort of) for Saturday's disappointment. And there will always be next weekend. And it had better not suck.

Creature Feature

A delicate symbol of the ephemeral joys of spring. Or something to shoot when there aren't any birds around.

Spring migration season has officially hit Florida, according to several reliable sources. These sources say that big flocks of warblers are passing overhead even as I type this, and that feeders all across Gainesville are swarming with Indigo Buntings, with the occasional Painted Bunting trailing in their wake.

Yeah, right.

My feeder is still in post-winter doldrum mode: it's busy, but with either the usual year-round residents (Northern Cardinals, Tufted Titmice, and increasingly, a large number of House Finches) and late-lingering Chipping Sparrows. No cool migrants, despite my amply stocked feeder and a birdbath that I have to clean daily because those *&#@ Titmice keep leaving sunflower seed hulls in it. Don't those ungrateful little buggers realize I've got a full-time job?

I thought spring migration would be cool because it happily coincided with the end of spring semester at UF. Finals week concluded yesterday, and classes the week before. So on Friday before finals—not having any new classes to prep for—I took a break and headed off to a local migrant trap, Loblolly Nature Center. I knew spring had arrived because of the preponderance of mosquitos, but birds were hard to find: The thick woods were noisy with the usual suspects, but Icould count the number of birds I actual saw during my two-hour exploration on my fingers. Truly pathetic.

On the upside, though, I saw some cool non-avian critters. My last few trips to Loblolly have yielded some cool damselflies; here's one of them. I don't know what the exact species is:

One of the spring trips sponsored by Alachua Audubon that was supposed to be REALLY REALLY good was to San Felasco Hammock State Preserve. And I thought it would be really good, too: as our assembled group lingered in the park's parking lot, we saw a bright male Summer Tanager perched overhead. How could this not be an omen of good things to come?

Very easily, apparently. We slogged from spot to spot, as our increasingly dismayed leader lamented that he had seen DOZENS AND DOZENS of Warblers and Buntings at this very place just days before. And we got--not much.

Still, it was a pleasant early morning walk with some of my favorite local people: the conversation was good, even though the birding was pathetic. The trip ended early because of the general uncooperativeness of the local migrant population.

But I wasn't ready to go home quite yet. There had to be something out there! So I headed to Bivens Arm Nature Park, a quiet, wooded enclave only five minutes from my place, to see what I could see. And just after I entered the park, I stopped on a little footbridge crossing a stream, and saw a male Black-throated Blue Warbler and a Worm-Eating Warbler in the same little creekside bush!

And being warblers, they refused to cooperate for any of my photo attempts. But the park was filled with non-avian critters: despite being only minutes from downtown Gainesville, its previously dry treams housed large alligators, some of whom bellowed ominously from the various seasonal water fixtures in the park. And on one of the paths, I encountered this large turtle:

It wasn't afraid of me, and let me take this close-up:

But my week wasn't totally bird-less: the next day, I headed off on the Alachua Audubon trip to Cedar Key, the local go-to place for coastal migrants. On the way in, we stopped at a reserve known for its population of Florida Scrub-Jays, the only bird species that only occurs in Florida. Like their more numerous Western Scrub-Jay cousins, they are bold and shameless, and not at all afraid of people. This was my only cooperative bird of the week:

Unlike back in California, spring migration here is (1) late and (2) generally sparser than fall migration; Apparently, the birds take different paths coming and going from their winter spots, and their spring trajectory doesn't always include Gainesville.

At least I now have something fun to look forward to in the fall.

The Third Rail

Rail #1: Sora

After last week's fire ant attack, I was tempted to skip birding this weekend. I've practically scratched my left leg off, it's freezing out, and I've got a ton of work to do before the semester ends—not to mention tons of prep for my classes next semester. By Friday, I'd more or less decided to stay indoors and away from biting insects until my leg healed and my to-do list shrunk to manageable proportions.

Then I came to my senses and went out anyways. If stayed in, I'd spend more time wondering what I was missing than working.

So on Sunday, I headed to Cedar Key with the Alachua Audubon field trip group. Our leader warned us that the birding could either be wonderful or non-existent: on one hand, the tide was going to be up when we were scheduled to arrive, meaning little shorebird activity. On the hand, the cold front could well drive in some interesting birds. And there was only one way to find out which way it would be...

Our first stop was on the edge of town, where we pulled off to the side of the road to look for shorebirds. The tide was lower than we expected, and huge flocks of Dunlins, Western Sandpipers, American Oystercatchers, and other usual suspects were feeding off in the distance. We also had a large group of American Avocets—a common bird back in Orange County, but a good sighting here.

In the reeds not far from us, someone spotted a Sora. I heard, but didn't see, a Clapper Rail: Someone played its call, but there was no response.

These were good birds, but we were now on the lookout for sparrows: the swampy area across the street was a known hangout for Nelson's Sharp-tailed Sparrows. And it wasn't long before we found one:

Nelson's Sharp-tailed Sparrow

This was a lifer for me, and I was happy. Then several more came into view, along with several Marsh Wrens. I love Marsh Wrens and haven't seen any since leaving California, so it was a pleasure to see and hear them again. For some reason, seeing them again reminded me that it won't be long until I get to go home for Christmas. Yay!

Soon after, another Sora popped into view, followed by a bold Virginia Rail, who moved in and out of the reeds, occasionally pecking at a dead sand crab nearby:

Rail #2: Virginia Rail

Someone started playing a Seaside Sparrow song on his iPod, but with no response. "Can you play a Clapper Rail?" on of the others asked, "There was one on the other side, but I missed it--and I've never seen one."

The iPod's owner was happy to oblige—and so was one of the local Clappers:


Rail #3: Clapper Rail

"Whoa. How about a Black Rail?" someone else asked. We tried that, and were met with only stillness. We had been lucky, and now we were greedy.

And this was just the first half hour of our trip. Our other major findings were a Bronzed Cowbird (another lifer for me), several Bald Eagles, and the discovery that birding near the runway of Cedar Key's tiny airport is not a good idea. (The police officer who informed us of this suggested that we go to the cemetery instead to look for Ospreys.)

By time we finished up at the cemetery (one skinny juvenile Osprey and a couple of strangely pale, nearly leucistic Red-trailed Hawks), it was almost 1:30 (we had assembled in Gainesville at 6:30), and I was hungry to the point of distraction. My carpool mate was as well, so we stopped at a local seafood place for lunch, where I made my second-to-last useful discovery of the day: Datil pepper sauce is really good on fried seafood. And most other things too, most likely.

My final discovery? On some lucky days, you don't have to work to be productive. And three rails in a day is enough.

One Month Later

Exactly one month ago today, I got up at 4:30 a.m., gulped down a cup of coffee and a day-old piece of Vietnamese cassava cake, and headed to LAX and two miserable flights that would lead me from my home and family in Southern California to my new job in Florida.

And today found me headed west out of Gainesville with a group of friendly and talented local birders to Cedar Key, a charming fishing village and renown local birding spot. We were on our way to a boat tour of the surrounding waters to look for shorebirds.

I was hoping that Hurricane Ike would bring in some interesting pelagics, just as tropical storm Fay did a few weeks back. Instead, Ike just raised the water levels so high that shore-dwelling peeps resorted to perching in the few bushes that remained above water level.


The funny thing about going on a shorebird trip with a bunch of inland birders is watching how excited they get by birds that I took for granted back in California, such as Marbled Godwits and Willets. In the meantime, I was getting quite excited by birds they all found quite ordinary, such as Tricolored Herons and American Oystercatchers (a lifer for me). But everyone WAS understandably surprised to see over 100 American Oystercatchers hanging out on a sandbar with a flock of Willets and various plovers:

Here's a closer shot of some of the Oystercatchers:


My favorite part of the boat tour was a stop by an island where a large flock of Magnificent Frigatebirds was roosting. These are great birds to watch. There is something vaguely sinister about the way they look (and the fact that they are kleptoparasitic feeders only adds to their aura of evil)--but that's part of the fun of watching them.

And here are some more of them.

After the boat trip, the group I had carpooled out with decided to try birding other parts of the Key, such as the cemetery—supposedly a good spot for migrating warblers. We didn't get any warblers, but we did get both Grey and Eastern Kingbirds, a Great Crested Flycatcher, and two Great Horned Owls, sitting practically back to back to each other. This photo shows only one of them, but the other wasn't far behind him:

On the way home, we were treated to the sight of several strikingly brilliant rainbows--so striking that several drivers besides us pulled off the side of the road to either gawk or take pictures. This shot only captures a fraction of the whole scene: from where we were, we could see the entire arc of one rainbow, with a second echoed faintly nearby:


I knew this could only be an omen of good fortune, But I returned home to an aggressively squirting leak under my bathroom sink, which had caused the entire bathroom to flood. The maintenance guy was out within half an hour. I'll be without hot water in the bathroom for the night, but at least the damage was contained. Maybe that's all the good luck I need.