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.

Random Photos and Haiku for a Quiet Weekend

I was really stoked
Whooping Cranes just down the street!
Oh my freaking god!



Over winter break
A Chestnut-backed Chickadee
North of Monterey.



Near New Smyrna Beach
A tiny Piping Plover
Feeding by the waves.



Florida Scrub-Jay
Looks like his western cousins
But vulnerable and rare.



I must buy more seed
Chipping Sparrows ate it all!
Greedy buggers, them.



The Cardinals are back
Singing and feeding outside
Spring is coming soon.

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.

Ocala National Forest: A Sucky Photo Super-Post!

An early morning treat, badly captured, near Ocala National Forest.

The observant may have noticed that I've managed to stretch three days of vacation into three weeks of blog posts. There are a few of reasons for this: first, Glenn and I collectively got thousands of photos out of our trip, and at least some of them had to go to good use; second, it really was the BEST birding trip I ever had (so far).

And third and most crucially, the birding in Gainesville since then has been pretty dull: most of our winter birds are gone (except for the gluttonous Chipping Sparrows who now camp out my courtyard and require me to buy a 5-pound bag of feed EVERY WEEK), and spring migration here is only showing hints of starting. While the trees and bushes back in California are swarming with Hermit and Nashville and Black-throated Grey Warblers (and Hooded and Bullock's Orioles and Warbling Vireos), here we've got...well,not much. Yet.

And yet, yesterday there arose an opportunity to see a rare local treat: this week's Alachua Audubon field trip was to Ocala National Forest , where our goal birds were Red-cockaded Woodpeckers, Florida Scrub Jays, and Bachman's Sparrows. All but the Florida Scrub-Jay—which I had only seen once before, at Merritt Island—would be lifers for me; and the seriously endangered Red-cockaded would be a valued treat for anyone who cares about birds.

The trip was everything I had hoped for: several of my favorite local birders showed up, we got just about everything we wanted to see, and the weather was great. The only problem was that all my photos sucked.

For instance, there's this photo of a Bachman's Sparrow, which we saw shortly after we parked and started our hike. We could hear the sparrows almost as soon as they arrived, and this guy popped up only minutes later.He wasn't that far away, but I still missed a good shot:

I figured my sparrow shots would be barely worthy of being called documentary shots. But no matter: what I really wanted was to see the Red-cockaded Woodpecker, and get a semi-identifiable photo.

We soon came upon a stand of trees where a colony of the woodpeckers had been known to nest. The birds nest in tree holes, and there were some trees with nest boxes already inserted, just for them:

All the trees with Red-cockaded nests—either manmade or bird-made—were conspicuously marked with rings of white paint:

This should have been our clue as to where to look—but the nest trees, even the ones that looked recently used, were quiet. But we heard the chattering of woodpeckers in the distance, and soon saw flashes of black and white against the pines—there they were!

I raised my camera to get a shot, but then lowered it: the birds were too far; the shot wouldn't be any good.

Then the birds took off, still chattering, and we followed. Along the way, I saw this Swallowtail, with a messed-up left back wing. I'm not sure what kind he is:

The chattering continued, and we followed it into the woods. We got good looks at about three birds—but every time I lifted my camera, they'd fly off or do that annoying woodpecker thing of hopping around to the opposite side of the tree. A few us us broke away from the group and plowed deeper into the woods. In the distance, the birds called and swooped from tree to tree, allowing great looks—and took off before we could get them in our viewfinders.

The others in our group were ready to move on, so we gave up our hunt. Now I was kicking myself for not at least trying to get a shot at that first RCW—he was far away, but at least he was standing still. We left the pine-filled sandhill area of the forest for an area of scrub nearby. Here, we hoped to find some Florida Scrub-Jays.

The path through the scrub was covered with fine sand, almost like very dry compacted beach sand. The sand was covered with several new-looking sets of animal prints: little canine ones that must have come from a coyote or fox (the trail was out of the way, and unlikely to appeal to dog-walkers—and no human prints but ours were in evidence), and several sets of bird prints, including these:

We were fascinated by the odd trailing marks behind the prints: was the bird (which must have been crow-sized) dragging its feet? Its tail?

The Scrub-Jays, as we hoped, came through: a pair of them soon popped up, screeching loudly at a nearby Eastern Towhee. Scrub-Jays are notoriously bold, and both birds came close enough to allow potentially decent shots:

Unfortunately, it was high noon by time we got there, and the sunlight and glare off the white sand made everything look oddly backlit. So despite having the most cooperative of avian subjects, this photo still sucked. But at least the bird is clear and identifiable.

And all the best images of the day are stuck in my brain. Luckily, I have a really good memory.