Buffalo, Buffaloed

What did I ever do to you?

For hundreds of years, wild bison have roamed the expansive area now comprising Paynes Prairie State Park. Believe it or not, bison aren't limited to the American west: at Paynes Prairie, seeing bison wading through a pond full of blooming lotus and flushing a sunbathing Anhinga or two isn't all that odd.

But if a proposed plan by Florida State Parks goes through, the bison will all but disappear, as will the herds of wild horses that also roam the prairie – not to mention a large part of the park's natural integrity.

The plan, allegedly still under discussion, is to remove all but a few bison and horses from the prairie. The animals, according to the Gainesville Sun, will be donated to whichever vendor takes them out, in return for their services.

The few remaining animals will be allowed to stay on the prairie – but in fenced-in enclosures close to one of the observation decks. This way every visitor will be guaranteed a bison sighting every time! None of that complicated stuff about nature taking its own course. And no more will visitors have to deal with tedious issues such as figuring out what the animals are doing as they wander rudely in and out of easy view. That's science, and science is HARD! After all, who goes to a state park to learn stuff about nature?

And gone will be the horrific possibility of seeing an actual WILD ANIMAL on the trail only a few yards from you! Everyone knows that WILD ANIMALS are DANGEROUS! WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN??

But seriously...the plan is baffling in its short-minded stupidity.

For one, the very "need" to take out the bison and horses is questionable. The official story is that that herd of 44 bison is becoming overcrowded and inbred, and increased development in the areas on the perimeter of the prairie increases the risk of an animal escaping the park and potentially injuring someone. And because bison and horses are technically livestock, the Park Service, which owns them, could be held liable for any such injuries. And keeping the few token beasts in an enclosure would make visitors happy, because now it's too hard for people to see them.

Let's consider these. As longtime park volunteer Chuck Littlewood stated in a recent righteous rant (how's that for alliteration?), nobody has been injured by a horse or bison in the thirty years since the animals were re-introduced to the prairie. (I've seen bison the the trail only a few yards away – they're comfortable enough around people to hold their ground, but they certainly won't go after anyone who just leaves them alone.) And because the animals are replacements for naturally occurring, indigenous wildlife, there is a solid legal basis for classifying them as wildlife rather than livestock. The inbreeding and overpopulation problems could be solved by selectively culling the herd – they don't have any natural predators in the park except for unusually large or ambitious alligators, so this may be a necessary evil.

As for the risk of escapes, bison and horses outside the park are no more dangerous than those within its boundaries. And seriously, people who choose to live on the edge of a wildlife preserve have no right to get their panties in a twist if a beastie or two occasionally breaches park borders. When I lived in California, I knew that having a well-stocked earthquake kit and stabilized bookshelves were part of the price of living there. When I moved to Florida, I knew my earthquake kit should be re-purposed as a hurricane kit. Every place has its advantages and risks, and dealing responsibly and non-hysterically with the latter is called being a grown-up.

Speaking of which... some of the best commentary on this half-baked plan came from the Independent Florida Alligator, the University of Florida's (technically unofficial) student newspaper. Having taught at UF for two years, I can characterize the typical UF student as bright, but still a work in progress. But some of those darn kids actually nailed down the inconsistencies of this proposal with laser-sharp accuracy. I'll just quote some of their better comments on the matter. First, there's this righteous snarkfest. Then there are these more modest comments:

"45 bison don't have enough room on 21,000 acres???
No one can see them, yet having 45 of them risks injuring people: which is it?

And the prairie is NOT a petting zoo; reducing the healthy herd to 8 females stuck standing around the visitor center sucks. Why not add a sign at the visitor's center: 'we sold all the male bison to meat factories and there are no bison actually on the prairie. We just keep these here to give the impression wild animals roam free! Enjoy your view'"

"Little children have walked the trail and seen the bison from up close! The bison are prone to move away from people and have not been a problem, The repair of fences could vastly reduce the "risk to the community."
The thirty years that the bison have been there has not produced enough concern for fences or bison -- nor a problem.
Lastly, Why would you give away a herd worth $$$$$ Follow the money! "

"..'the Florida Park Service believes this is the best course of action after consulting with UF geneticists and the National Bison Association, a non-profit organization that matches bison sellers to meat buyers.'
Boy sounds like they have the animals' best interests in mind!"

Park volunteers I've talked to echoed the second commenter's concern: the plan is for the Park Service to simply give away the meat from several dozen bison. If they must cull some of the animals, the volunteers argued, why not sell them? Buffalo meat is more expensive than beef on the commercial market, and the monies made from meat sales – if a cull is deemed necessary – could go toward the upkeep of the fences surrounding the park. One volunteer said he calculated that the funds that could be earned from selling a few animals a year at retail value could keep the fences around the park maintained – and the rest of the animals safe.

A public hearing on the matter is scheduled for Tuesday, November 30 at 7:00 p.m. Details are available here (scroll down to the bottom of page 3). If you live around here and care about our state parks staying distinct from petting zoos, you should consider dropping by.

Life Goes Ani

Fall migration has been great. So great, I've been too busy looking at birds to write about it. But I hope to make up for this shortly.

Last weekend was supposed to be the peak of fall migration for north-central Florida, and I was determined to squeeze in as many sightings as possible. But Saturday's Alachua Audubon field trip to Bolen Bluff-- where I had a record fifteen-warbler day this time last year--was pleasant, but uneventful: lots of Black-and-white Warblers and American Redstarts, but not much else.

The most memorable bird of the trip was several miles away. We had worked our way to the bluff and down into the prairie basin when the news arrived.

"GROOVE-BILLED ANI! GROOVE-BILLED ANI AT THE OBSERVATION DECK AT LA CHUA!" yelled one of the hard-core birders, holding up his cell phone. He had just gotten a call from the local birdhead who had just found it. We watched in puzzlement as he sprinted away from the rest of the group.

"Hey, where are you going?" our trip leader asked.

"GROOVE-BILLED ANI!" he yelled back.

As we progressed down through the prairie looking at Indigo Buntings and early Savannah Sparrows, we talked about the Groove-billed Ani. First, we explained what it was for the beginning birders present, who were beginning to think that the rest of us were insane. Then, we marveled at its presence in Paynes Prairie: these birds are rare visitors to our neck of the woods and this would be only the tenth sighting on record.

On the next morning's trip to Palm Point, everyone was still talking about it. We learned that our friend from the day before had shlepped two miles back to the Bolen Bluff trailhead, driven across town, then shlepped another two miles down the La Chua trail--only to find that the Ani had flown the coop. Meanwhile, Palm Point was yielding a terrific assortment of warblers, including a very bold Magnolia,

a strangely bland-looking Cape May,

and a third warble that Glenn managed to photograph, but couldn't ID.

"What is this?" he asked me, pointing at his viewfinder.

I looked at the bird. Some faint stripes on the head. Wing bars, A bit of streaking on the flanks. Definitely a warbler, but what? I called over our trip leader and asked him.

"Wow, that's a Blackburnian!: he exclaimed. "Where did you see it?"

Another confusing fall warbler for our collection--and Glenn had captured a life bird without knowing it!

But everyone was still talking about that Ani. The next morning, I opened my e-mail and found a message saying it had been seen on Sunday morning, while we were looking at warblers at Palm Point. It was still early. I showed Glenn the e-mail.

And then we went to La Chua. One of the great things about being self-employed is that you're free to make stupid decisions. Yes, I should have been making cold calls to potential clients or going to some shmooze breakfast with the Chamber of Commerce, but this was a Groove-billed Ani we were talking about here.

We got to the observation deck around 9:30 and met some local birders on their way out who said they had seen it about ten minutes earlier! So it was still there! Cool.

So we waited.

And waited.

Another birder showed up with a spotting scope. "So you're looking for it too?" I asked. "Looking for what?" he asked.

He hadn't heard about the Ani. But once I told him, he was all in.

An hour later, another birder arrived, an extroverted older guy who immediately introduced himself to the three of us on the platform. "Well, since we're going to be here a while, we might as well get to know each other," he said.

As the day progressed, it got hotter and hotter on the platform, and my lust to see the Ani was rapidly losing out to my lust for a hot pressed Cuban sandwich. The two other gentlemen on the platform with us were great company, but this whole experience was beginning to suck.

By 1:30, we gave up and headed home.

The next morning, I got another e-mail: the first guy who joined us on the platform -- who didn't even know the Ani was there -- had gotten a video of the bird and posted it on YouTube! Apparently, the video was taken around 4:40 that afternoon, which meant that guy had been waiting there a good five or six hours. Holy cow. Well, I guess he was more deserving of a sighting than we were.

And here's what we would have seen if only we waited around another four hours:

Okay. So the Ani had been there for a few days. It tended to show up either early in the morning, or late in the afternoon. So we'd try for an afternoon sighting.

On Tuesday, we got to the platform around 3:30. La Chua is invariably silent and birdless in mid-afternoon, and this was seriously depressing. But as the sun went down, the chorus of Red-winged Blackbirds got louder, White and Glossy Ibises began flying in, and things began to look promising. But no Ani. We waited until 5:00. The park closed at 6:00, and it would take over half an hour to walk back to the trailhead. So we left.

On the way back, we ran into a ranger in his truck, no doubt headed to the observation platform to herd any late lingerers back to the trailhead. I recognized him: he was not only a ranger, but also a serious birder. He stopped his truck and rolled down a window.

"So, did you see it?"

"No."

We saw him again on the way back, parking his truck near the trailhead. We asked him if he had seen anything. He smiled and looked apologetic.

We had missed it by fifteen minutes. Again.

We decided to give the Ani one more shot. But not until Thursday. On Wednesday morning at sunrise, we were meeting with a friend who'd show us where some of the last locally nesting Burrowing Owls were. And unlike the Ani, the Burrowing Owls were right where they were expected to be. Who doesn't love a Burrowing Owl, especially with a face like this?

We resumed our Ani hunt on Thursday morning. When arrived at La Chua, just before eight, it was foggy and cool out, and Palm Warblers and Indigo Buntings were everywhere. But our goal was the Ani, and we didn't stop until we got to the observation platform.

And there, about thirty feet off the trail in the fog, was a mid-size black bird with a long tail--not a crow,nor a grackle. I had brought my scope, and I focused it on the bird: it had a thick beak and shaggy head feathers: our Ani!

We spent the next two hours watching it. Some other local birders joined us on the observation platform, and we all watched in delight as it flew in and landed low in a shrub just off the trail. In books, the Groove-billed Ani looks fierce and predatory, but in real life, it's downright cute -- its vocalizations are gentle and sweet and the bird itself has a weirdly wistful face that reminds me of a Muppet. One of the other birders told me Anis are social birds, and this one looked like it wanted company. We all felt a little sad that it was so far away from others of its own kind. But its generous display for us more than made up for its elusiveness earlier in the week.

And it only took me a week of waiting to get the bird.

Wordless Wednesday: A Family Outing on Paynes Prairie

Scenes From the Prairie

Wild horses on Bolen Bluff trail, Paynes Prairie State Reserve

Fall migration is over. The warblers I enjoyed only a few weeks ago are now (I hope) safely ensconced in their winter digs in the tropics. And our winter visitors have only begun to settle in: A flock of Chipping Sparrows has already planted itself underneath my feeder, and the Eastern Phoebes ( not nearly as clean and natty-looking as my western Black Phoebes) have been singing loudly just about everywhere. This guy was on the prairie at Bolen Bluff:

Paynes Prairie is always a good place to visit when you want to go out, but know there won't be that many birds. There is always some interesting non-avian distraction. For the past month or two at Bolen Bluff, I've passed by this beautiful wasps' nest: I love how symmetrical it is. It looks like something that could be sold at Crate and Barrel as a yuppie decorative item. But I understand that the wasps who built it can deliver a nasty sting:

There's something perverse about the fact that temperatures in the mid-70s feel a bit chilly here. And when we turned back the clocks last week, it did feel unexpectedly autumnal. A strange reflex of this change of seasons was the eruption of yellow blooms at La Chua last weekend:

There have been rumors of Grasshopper and White-crowned Sparrows—and even an errant Scissor-Tailed Flycatcher—at La Chua over the past few weeks, but I haven't found any of these, yet. Right now, I'm just enjoying the autumnal weather (such as it is out here), and waiting for the chirps and calls of winter visitors.

Two Goodbyes

Dominick would have gotten a better shot: A House Wren at La Chua Trail.

This month, two friends passed suddenly, before I could even say goodbye.

The first was an old friend that had been a part of my life and my family's life since my childhood: Gourmet magazine. The corporate bean-counters at Condé Nast decided axe the revered 70-year-old franchise while continuing to support its vapid kid sister, Bon Appétit.

I love cooking as much as I love birding, and as a former professional cook, I can say with objective certainty that the difference between Gourmet and Bon Appétit was the difference between Roger Tory Peterson and the doofus I met a while back who mistook a Great Egret ten feet away for a pelican.

All the obituaries for Gourmet sneered that it was fusty and elitist, not designed for "the way people live today" in "these recessionary times". I call bullshit. True, it wasn't meant for people who are content with microwaved Lean Cuisine for dinner. But neither was it unusable: most of the recipes were easily do-able by any competent home cook, and the magazine had a regular section dedicated to recipes meant for weeknight cooking. And these generally contained lots of (cheap) pasta and veggies. And it featured, along with its wonderfully out-of-left-field travel and food culture articles (Slovenian food! The cooking of Yemenite exiles in Israel!), the ever-entertaining Roadfood column, which lovingly described regional specialties at some of the most blue-collar, American vernacular eateries imaginable.

Bon Appétit, by contrast, features celebrity hamburger recipes.

I looked forward to a new issue of Gourmet every month, to travelling vicariously to decidedly weird places and trying the accompanying recipes—the smells and tastes made me imagine I was there. My subscription was cheap, the writing was great, and the recipes were fun to make and to think about. When I was too busy to follow them to the letter, which was often, I'd just riff off them and still get some pretty good stuff.

And I just got my last-ever issue in the mail yesterday. It even had a bird on the cover—just for me!


And as usual, when I tore off the shrink wrap and opened it, all those annoying perforated "Send a gift subscription to a friend!" cards fell out.

I feel like filling them out and sending them all back to Condé Nast as a protest.

The demise of Gourmet was a sad surprise. But even sadder, and more surprising, was the passing of Dominick Martino, known affectionately as "the unofficial official photographer of Paynes Prairie". He lost his battle with bone cancer—which I didn't even know he was fighting—last week.

The first time I met Dominick was on my first-ever visit to La Chua. I went with another local birder, who had volunteered to show me around. Dominick was, as usual, tooling about in the little golf cart provided to him by the park, and immediately struck up a bird-related conversation. As we left, my host remarked, "Some people around here are kind of afraid of him."

"Really? Why?" I asked. I couldn't imagine anyone being afraid of such a friendly and jolly character.

"Well, if you get to talking with him, you might get sucked into 45 minutes of conversation. Sometimes, he just can't stop!"

It was true that he could talk forever about the flora and fauna of Paynes Prairie. And about taking photos. Both of which he clearly loved.

There was rarely if ever I time that I went to La Chua and didn't see him there; he was as much a part of the landscape as the alligators and wintering Sandhill Cranes, and his New York accent was as interwoven into La Chua's soundtrack as the calls of Red-winged Blackbirds. I thought of him as the Tommy Lasorda of Paynes Prairie: a knowledgeable and shamelessly biased booster.

The last time I saw him was in early August, during an especially pleasant day of birding: I was at La Chua with a friend and we were enjoying summering Purple Gallinules, Swallow-tailed and Mississippi Kites, and even a few distant Whooping Cranes. Dominick was at the observation platform at the end of the trail with his camera, and we spent close to an hour up there, chatting and watching storm clouds go by. As usual, he was having a whale of a time watching the movements of the birds and animals. And despite the typically repulsive Florida summer heat, it felt like a perfect day to be alive, with perfect company to share it with.

If he was already sick at the time, he certainly didn't look it or act like it.

I can't say I knew Dominick all that well, except for his love and knowledge of Paynes Prairie. But my visits to La Chua, his usual haunt, will be sadder without him. Like my lamented subscription to Gourmet, I figured he, and the pleasure of his company, would always be there.

Goodbye, old friends. Life will be a lot less fun without you.

15

Fallout Boy: A Rose Breasted Grosbeak at Bolen Bluff. (No, really)

I heard an NPR interview last year with a statistician who said he always started introductory classes with the following trick: he'd divide the class into two groups, leave the room, and have one group record the results of 100 actual coin tosses, and the other make up series of 100 imagined coin tosses that would look as random as possible. Both groups would then write the results of their real/imagined tosses on the board, and when he'd return, he'd try to determine which series was the real one and which the the imagined one.

He said it was always easy to tell the actual coin toss sequences from the imagined ones: the real sequences always looked implausible (a series of 20 consecutive tail tosses, for instance), while the fake sequences looked suspiciously even.

The moral? Reality is inherently implausible.

On Friday, a number of implausible but agreeable things happened: the temperature plummeted from the high 80s to the low 60s; a grand double rainbow surfaced as a took my morning run, and UF (and, as I later learned, ALL of Gainesville's public schools) shut down for UF's homecoming celebrations. (WHY grade-schoolers should get the day off because a bunch of old galoots in RVs want to relive their youth is a bit of a head-scratcher.)

On Saturday morning, I woke up to pleasantly chilly weather and clear skies—perfect for a long walk!—as well as a Badbirdz Reloaded radar report promising Tons of Migrants. But I felt none of the usual frenzy for acquisition that goes with my Saturday mornings during migration. My miserable luck over the past few weeks had beaten me into a Zen-like state of equanimity: I had broken free from the deluded belief that I could find warblers at Bolen Bluff the same way I find weird microbrews at Trader Joe's. Like the Buddha, I would desire nothing, and simply wait for the universe to do its thing. Whatever it was.

Unlike the Buddha, I still had my bins and a desire to look at birds—any birds. So I hitched up with the Alachua Audubon field trip to Bolen Bluff on Saturday morning. Since it was the last weekend of migration and the weather was so pleasant, over a dozen people showed up. And almost as soon as we hit the trail, we heard and saw a male Hooded Warbler. Not bad.

And only moments after that, we had a few American Redstarts. Nice, but unremarkable. Then a Black-and-white Warbler. Then a Magnolia Warbler. Following scolding flocks of Caroline Chickadees, we found yet more Redstarts. It was beginning to look like that radar report was spot on.

Our next treats: high in the trees was a pair of male Rose-breasted Grosbeaks. And in a berry-filled camphor tree known by birders for its popularity with thrushes were—thrushes! The zone of my brain reserved for East Coast thrush ID is still a fuzzy mess, but reputable people in our group IDed several Grey-cheeked Thrushes and Wood Thrushes.

And despite the dozen of us stomping happily and loudly down the trail, the birds kept coming: we found a tree just off the trail containing about 5 warbler species, including a pair of Black-throated Green Warblers (the first and only I'd seen all season), as well as Bay-breasted and Chestnut-sided Warblers. Ovenbirds hopped around on the ground nearby, and in a nearby tree was a female Scarlet Tanager.

By now, everyone was oohing and aahing in weak-kneed joy. Our trip leader, a hard-core, seen-it-all-before local birder, was overwhelmed. This morning had made up for absolutely all the mornings of bug bites and warbler-less ennui of the preceding months.

The one area in which I didn't not get lucky yesterday was in getting pictures: the hungry warblers were high in the trees and moving fast.

Out on the prairie, we added two more to our warbler count: a Common Yellowthroat and several Palm Warblers. We looked around for Yellow and Prairie Warblers, which failed to materialize, and were beginning to wonder what our final warbler count would be. We were up to 14. Could we hit 15?

It should be mentioned that the number 15 has local relevance beyond being an a good round number: as any self-respecting college football fan knows, 15 is also Tim Tebow's number, and Saturday was UF's homecoming weekend home game, which means GO GATORS!! WOOHOO!!

(Okay, there's a municipal code requiring all Gainesville-based blogs to say that at least once a year. Now where was I?)

Oh yes, birds! There were lots of them! On our way back out of the prairie, we got good looks at a Yellow-billed Cuckoo, and yet more Rose-breasted Grosbeaks. We spotted another warbler that may or may not have been a Prairie—but none of use were sure enough to call it make it our #15.

Still, there were plenty more warblers on the way back out to the trailhead: more American Redstarts and Yellow-throateds and dozens of Magnolia Warblers ( we teased our leader every time he spotted something and said it was "just" a Magnolia! ) Then we saw something else: a bit like a Magnolia, but not really. Not a Prairie either. It hopped around about 20 feet in front of us for a couple of minutes while we passed a bird guide around and examined it: a Cape May!

We had hit 15! And this was a great bird to get, too: Cape Mays show up in Gainesville pretty regularly during spring migration, but rarely during the fall.

WOOHOO!

And that afternoon, the Gators won (barely) their hard-fought battle against Arkansas, with concussion-suffering #15 leading the way. Coincidence? I think not.

Gator fans, you can thank Alachua Audubon later.

After the Deluge

Just when I think I've got things figured out here, the rules change. Shortly after moving here, I noticed that summer/autumn mornings tend to be hot and dry, and afternoons hot and rainy. One of my biologist friends told me this is because all the evaporation of the many local lakes and rivers during the morning condenses into rain clouds by afternoon—when all that moisture returns to earth in the form of rain. I've trained myself to get up at the crack of dawn for my daily run, in order to avoid the rain and heat of the afternoon.

But this weekend, things got weird. There was no rain at all on Thursday and Friday, but on Saturday, just when I really, really, wanted to go out and look for fall migrants, it rained on and off all morning. I took Glenn to Loblolly Nature Center, normally a good place during migration, and got nothing but mosquito bites and dozens of White-eyed Vireos.

Then it started to rain, and since Glenn didn't want all his photo gear to get wet, we headed back to the car.

This would have been a reasonable time to pack up and go home. But instead, we went to the Lake Wauberg entrance to Paynes Prairie State Park (I optimistically assumed the rain at Loblolly was just a local squall), where we paid $6 to get in and saw next to nothing. And got rained on again.

Saturday was shot. The drive home took us past the Bolen Bluff parking lot, empty except for a couple of familiar-looking cars. No doubt other birders braving the rain—and no doubt they were seeing boatloads of migrating wonders in there.

On Sunday morning, I woke up early to the sound of rain pounding on the roof. Great. By nine or so, it seemed to have passed, so we headed down to Bolen Bluff. It's an odd place--whenever we go, some areas are nearly silent, while others filled with the squawks and chirps of feeding flocks on the move. And the quiet and active spots are different every time.

Feeding flock #1 was in a shady, swampy, palmetto-filled area usually devoid of interesting birds. But on Sunday morning, it was noisy with calling Ovenbirds and singing Yellow Warblers, along with various more prosaic hangers-on. But all were too fast, and too deep in the brush, for any photos. Our consolation for missing good shots of the warblers was a sighting of a bright male Summer Tanager, perched fairly low on a branch hanging across the trail in front of us:

Feeding flock #2 was a crazy combination of everything: White-eyed Vireos, Carolina Chickadees, Tufted Titmice, and Downy Woodpeckers were all feeding together, albeit peevishly—I know one shouldn't anthopomorphize animals, but their sharp warning calls whenever anyone else got close definitely suggested they didn't welcome each other's company. In this flock of residents were a large number of Northern Parulas, a couple of Yellow-throated Warblers, and a couple of Black-and-white warblers.

As we were heading back to the trailhead, we ran into one of the local birding hotshots, who told us he had seen a Blackburnian Warbler there the day before (aha! So his was one of the vaguely familiar cars in the lot!), and had a female/immature Chestnut-sided Warbler that morning. Both of which, (naturally) we missed. Later, I found out from the grapevine that this guy had seen 12 warblers on the morning we saw him! And he was, characteristically, too polite to brag about this in our presence. Because we suck as birders and there was really no need for him to rub it in.

Well, at least we got this guy.

Bird Tweets

Shut up and bird!

I'm probably the last person under 80 in the civilized world without a Twitter account. I have several principled reasons for this: (1) sloth, (2) my life is generally boring, (3) on the rare occasions it's not boring, I'd much rather throw myself fully into whatever I'm doing than tell everyone about it, and (4) all those perpetually exciting people with Twitter feeds would probably agree with (2).

But there is a weird, haiku-like allure to some tweets. At best, they're like phone calls from kidnap victims: just enough info to leave you hanging for more. Thus,some pundits have declared blogging in full sentences to be hopelessly démodé. Just in case they're right, here's my weekend as a series of fake tweets!

Saturday, 8:00 a.m: 2 early 4 migrants at Palm Point. Here anyways. Y?
8:05: Whistle-like call/song in trees. Can't ID.
8:06: Can't locate calling bird. Where is it?
8:07: Nothing in trees but 2 ducks. No other birds. Who's calling?

8:08: Black-bellied WHISTLING-DUCK. DUH!

Sunday, 7:50 a.m: Deer at Paynes Prairie, by parking lot. Awesome!

8:15: Bobwhite calling. Can't find it.
8:20: 12-foot gator w/open mouth. Moving towards us. Yikes.
9:00: Found 2 Purple Gallinules! Freaking pretty birds.

9:01: Gallinules have 2 babies! Very cute.
9:15: Cool lavender dragonflies are everywhere! They look blue in pix.

10:00: At platform at end of trail. 2 rangers there.
10:01: Rangers are saying 2 Whooping Cranes seen earlier!
10:15: Waiting 4 cranes. Lots of growling gators. 1 is on trail by platform now.

10:30: The Whoopers are here! Mated pair. 2 far 4 pix.
10:32: Will they breed here? We all hope so.
10:40: Swallow-tailed Kites overhead!

11:00: Effing hot out here! Thunderheads moving in.
11:15: Ack, rain! 1/2 mile back 2 parking lot.
11:30: Swallow-tailed Kites again, and a Mississippi Kite too!
11:45: Hot. Thirsty. Sticky. Need a shower badly.
12:00: Outta here and heading home. Bye till next weekend!

Bad Excuse of the Week

Spring migration activity has been kind of sparse out here, but I still managed to get a lifer out of it: migrating Bobolinks at Bolen Bluff trail of Paynes Prairie during an Alachua Audubon field trip there on Sunday morning. Those of us out there were also lucky enough to get a Bobwhite and a couple of bright Indigo Buntings. We were also treated to the sight of a family of wild horses with a tiny foal, and a pair of young Homo sapiens sprawled out inexplicably in an amorous tangle in the middle of the trail. ("Must be a tick collection experiment," noted a curmudgeon in our group.)

On Sunday afternoon, our local bird bard sent out his weekly e-mail, reporting that he'd seen several Bobolinks and Orchard Orioles, as well as Purple Gallinules, along the La Chua Trail, northeast of Bolen Bluff in Paynes Prairie, that morning. So after a painfully tedious afternoon of grading term papers and other work-related bureaucracy, off I went. I'd gotten some good looks at Bobolinks that morning, but no respectable photos. And I really needed another bird break.

Well, I didn't get any photos. I wanted to, and I headed down the trail to the spot where they had been seen regularly over the past few days; Then I saw a park ranger and a cluster of visitors, and figured they were part of a guided tour. But then I realized there were blocked from moving ahead on the trail by a slight obstacle:


(The dude's head on the right side of the photo is cut off on purpose: it's bad art, but it's worse ethics to post an identifiable online photo someone without that person's permission.)

The obstacle wandered off after about 10 minutes, and I forged ahead--then I realized I didn't have my phone with me, nor any way of contacting the rangers should yet more obstacles of this sort should cross my path. It's mating/baby season for the gators, and perfect sunbathing weather as well: More heat-seeking gators could well wander up onto the trail, and the ranger looked like he was heading home. So I chickened out and turned back.

But I'll be back...

Best. Spring Break. Ever. (Part 1)

Look at this guy. Really. Just look at him. Then look in the mirror and ask yourself how you could possibly deserve to share a planet with a creature this gorgeous.

And once you've scraped your jaw back off the floor, take a deep breath and try to convince a non-birder that Painted Buntings are not exotics imported from the jungles of Borneo, but fellow Americans: they winter in Florida and summer in Texas and Oklahoma, according to The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America .

My week-long spring break was filled with such wonders. After my brief trip to California, Glenn followed me back to Gainesville for two weeks of Florida birding and bird photography. Upon arriving at my place, he immediately scored four lifers: Northern Cardinals, Carolina Wrens, Carolina Chickadees, and Tufted Titmice were flocking my feeder, along with the usual flock of Chipping Sparrows.

I couldn't wait to show him everything I'd seen. Normally, I love birding alone, but it's sad to see something great and have nobody to share it with, and I've had too many sad moments birding in Gainesville. So I planned a dream day of photographer-friendly birding for our first full day together in Florida: a morning at Lake Wauberg, in the southern part of Paynes Prairie State Park , followed by a break for the excellent pizza at nearby Blue Highway in Micanopy, then an afternoon looking at gators and waders at La Chua Trail.

As we entered the park and headed towards Lake Wauberg, we saw a large herd of deer and a flock of Wild Turkeys (another lifer for Glenn) just off the side of the road. Things were looking good. In the trees by the lake, I heard an insistent drone of an unfamiliar song, and discovered that the Northern Parulas were back in force. To Glenn's frustration, they stayed high in the treetops, resisting most of our attempts to photograph them. This was the best I could do:

We spent a couple of hours at the boardwalk by the lake, watching Bald Eagles, Anhingas, and Grey Catbirds—all typical birds around here, but uncommon or non-existent back in California.

The birding at La Chua was unremarkable, but still fun: we got there around 2:30, and most of the herons and egrets seemed to have gone missing, but the afternoon sun brought out a jaw-dropping inventory of reptiles: dozens of turtles of all shapes and sizes, alligators ranging in size from 8 inches to 8 feet, and ponds covered with slithering black water snakes. Here's a soft-shelled turtle with a very odd nose:

We were the last ones to leave the park before it closed (the ranger locked the gate behind us as we pulled out of the parking lot). But just before leaving, I stopped by the horse barn near the trailhead to look for the now-resident Harris' Sparrow, which I thought would be a great treat for Glenn—and he found it before I did! Yet another lifer for him.

After leaving La Chua, we dropped by the Paynes Prairie overlook off Highway 441 to see if anything interesting was coming in as the sun set. The area sounded birdy, and there seemed to be flying critters everywhere. Unfortunately, a preponderance of these were mosquitos, so we beat a quick retreat for home.

It had been a day of doing things I'd done a million times before since moving out here, but it was the most fun I've ever had here. Having someone to share the fun with makes all the difference.

And in the next few days, the birding was only going to get better.

And Then There Was One

Where it began: Wood Storks at Lake Wauberg, by the southern end of Paynes Prairie.

This is a story of life and loss, and it began and ended this morning at Lake Wauberg.

I've been meaning the check the place out for a while, and this morning I finally did. After paying the $3 admission fee at the main entrance to Paynes Prairie State Park (one of the things that had been keeping me away—yes, I'm that cheap), I drove slowly towards the lake, slowing down to watch herds of deer grazing by the side of the road.

I parked the car and birded the wooded area by the parking lot before heading to the water. I found a loud feeding flock filled with scolding Carolina Wrens and a good mix of warblers: a couple of Black and Whites, a Yellow-throated, and an Ovenbird.

The boardwalk trail by the edge of the lake was beautiful: right off the boardwalk were the two Wood Storks above, calmly preening at the water's edge. Double-crested Cormorants and Pie-billed Grebes dove in and out of the water, and flocks of White Pelicans were everywhere:

At the far end of the boardwalk was a grassy picnic area, where I saw two Bald Eagles flying overhead, and several Wild Turkeys on the ground. Here's one of them:

The Wild Turkey was one of my nemesis birds when I first moved out here. My weekly near-miss encounters with them invariably went something like this:

OTHER BIRDER: Oh look! Wild Turkeys!
ME: Oh wow, where??
OTHER BIRDER: RIght over--oops, now they're gone.

Now I can't complain any more.

On the way back over the boardwalk, I spotted a Marsh Wren and a Swamp Sparrow in the marshy area at the lake's edge. There were also a couple of noisy catbirds, eating berries and harassing each other. Here's one of them.

And then there were the Wood Storks again. One of them was in pretty much the same area where I had left him about 45 minutes before. But the other?

All that remained was a single wing, lying on top of the water, to the left of the surviving bird. I'm guessing he or she became breakfast for some hungry alligator—the Wood Storks seem too big for the local raptors to take out.

And the remaining Wood Stork? Still there, doing what it has to do. He or she has obviously moved on.

Nature's life lessons can be ugly, but they bear repeating. Treasure the fleeting gift that is your life. Don't waste time looking backwards.

And pay attention to those "No Swimming" signs at Lake Wauberg. They're there for a good reason.

Attack of the Flying Metaphor

The infamous Harris' Sparrow deigns to make an appearance for me.

My birding expectations for this weekend were pretty low. For one, I've had a nasty cold and laryngitis for the past week and a half, and thought it would be wise to spend the weekend resting. Second, there didn't seem to be that many interesting birds being found locally—there was a sighting of a Masked Duck, which would have been a lifer for me—but I didn't feel up to driving halfway to Tallahassee to look for it.

I hate being sick.

But I hate being stuck indoors even more. This morning, when I heard the first Cardinal chipping outside my window, I got up and decided to return to La Chua Trail. I had been there twice in the past week, and I knew I wasn't likely to see anything now that I didn't see then. I just needed to get out.

Getting out, however, took longer than I expected. It has been crazy cold for for the past few days, and there has been frost on the ground most mornings as of late. But today, I went outside and found my car fully encrusted in frost. Big thick layers of it obscured both windshields.

When I lived in Canada, my friends there teased me for not keeping an ice scraper in my car. But somehow, I managed to survive three years in Vancouver without one.

And it never occurred to me to get one when I moved to Florida.

Still, I managed to get the ice off my car and get to La Chua just before 9:00. When I stepped out of the car, I was glad I came: I could hear birds everywhere: Robins, Red-bellied and Downey Woodpeckers, Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Carolina Chickadees... all ordinary birds, but in unusual numbers. Down the trail, a Hermit Thrush popped up, Northern Cardinals were singing loudly, and huge numbers of Palm Warblers jumped around in the leaf litter, flicking their tails.

I had set a low-level goal of looking for White-throated Sparrows: they were supposed to be regular winter birds at La Chua, but I had never seen one. A White-throated Sparrow would be a lifer for me, and I wanted one. But I wasn't expecting much: it was already on the late side for sparrows (according to local wisdom, the sparrows at La Chua are most active and visible early in the morning; after 9:00 it's too late). And I had tried and failed to relocate the visiting Harris' Sparrow twice the previous weekend and hadn't heard any news of it all week, so I assumed it had taken off as well.

I was thinking about this while checking out a flock of singing White-crowned Sparrows mingling with a few Savannah Sparrows. The birds were unusually bold, and I managed to get fairly close to them. Then out of nowhere came...the Harris' Sparrow! And he landed in a bare bush directly in front of me, and sat—nearly stationary—for several minutes, allowing me to take several pictures.

Weirdly, I wasn't even terribly surprised by this. My first thought was something like, "Well, it's about time, you evil little bastard!" But then I felt—just happy. I just stood there and watched the little bird twitch about on the branch, thinking of how lucky I was to be right there at that very time.

Then it occurred to me that just about all the truly cool stuff in my life—my friends, my hobbies, my academic research—all came to me much as that Harris' Sparrow did: by happy accident, often after I'd given up looking for something or was obsessed with getting something else. While I constantly badger my students to Stay Organized, Be Responsible, and Plan Ahead, I'm coming to the realization that all the planning the the world won't always get you what you want ( yup, I'm a slow learner). And some of the things I didn't plan for have led me to amazing places—like to Gainesville, and to a bare bush with a strange sparrow in it.

To paraphrase John Lennon, "Lifers are what happens when you're making other plans."

Dispatch from the Gator Nation

Oh no, not one of these things again!

No school is more deeply, obsessively into its mascot than the University of Florida. There's a late-night bus service called Later Gator. The webpage that tracks buses to and from campus is called Gator Locator. The university's day care center is called Baby Gator. The secure, online system faculty members use to submit grades every semester is called—wait for it—Grade-A-Gator. I'm not making this up.

And yet, it was still surprising to find that there are, indeed, real alligators slithering their way around the town's periphery in large numbers. After a morning of birding my favorite weekend spots (Palm Point and Powers Park), I dropped by La Chua Trail, on the north end of Paynes Prairie, to look for any winter sparrows that may have started wandering in. I got a few Song Sparrows, several Palm Warblers, and an enticing little sparrow-like bird I couldn't ID. There was also a female Northern Harrier, and a nice assortment of waders. But the most noticeably numerous creatures there were the gators.

There were really big guys, like the one above, as well as oddly proportioned babies:



In Alachua Sink, about a dozen of them were basking on a mudflat. Here are a few of them:



All along the trail, there are big, ominous signs warning people to keep a safe distance from the gators, and to be sure to be off the trail by dusk, when the gators start to feed. IF IT MOVES IT"S FOOD! one of them practically screamed. Oddly, the local birds (all of whom seemed to be moving) didn't seem terribly concerned: the gators on the mudflat were surrounded by a large flock of Least Sandpipers foraging calmly away; and everywhere else on the trail, Little Blue Herons, Common Moorhens, and White Ibises were resting or hunting only feet away from basking gators. The Cattle Egrets below are clearly not worried about getting eaten:



There was also a large variety of butterflies on the trail, which made me realize I should get a guidebook and learn more about them. This was one I hadn't seen before:



As I walked back to the trailhead, a couple with several young children passed and asked where the alligators were. I told them to it wasn't very far, and they wouldn't have to look very hard. And I was out of there long before sunset.