The Unbearable Cuteness of Being

Oooh! Cute!

Spring migration has been a bust. My little corner of Florida has been blessed with calm, sunny weather for the past month, which is great for people and birds -- but not for people who want to look at birds. As one of my more knowledgeable birding pals told me, migrating birds want to get to their breeding grounds fast, and if the weather is clear, they're not going to stop. And in my area, not that many migrating birds have seen a need to stop.

Last week, Glenn and I went on Alachua Audubon's annual pilgrimage to Fort DeSoto, and scored a couple of Cape May, Black-throated Blue, and Blackpoll Warblers -- but no other migrants. Last night, a powerful thunderstorm hit Gainesville, and as I lay in bed watching the lightning flash across the sky, I wondered how many migrants might have chosen to spend the night in town rather than fly through the storm.

The answer: not many. A quick early-morning trip to Bolen Bluff revealed a single migrant warbler -- a male American Redstart -- and dozens and dozens of squirrels. Oh boy.

Still, the transition from winter to spring still shows itself in the changing inventory of birds. Local summer breeders such as Summer Tanagers and Blue Grosbeaks have started showing up, and rumor has it the Purple Gallinules have arrived on Paynes Prairie, just in time for breeding season. I haven't seen one locally yet this season, but on a trip south about a month ago, we got to see a particularly pretty one at the Orlando Wetlands, where they occur year round:

Luckily, when there's nothing else to look at during the hot season, there are always babies. Like the one above. He/she was one of four we saw peeping and sort-of walking in the underbrush at Lettuce Lake Park, in Tampa. Holy cow. Cutest. Thing. Ever. Times four.

All of us who watched the little family were enthralled. We figured the babies must be really young, given there were still so many of them (and there were a large number of hungry alligators nearby). We marvelled at how different they looked from their parents. The little puffballs made me wonder if there's some kind of universal template for all precocial chicks, and at some point in their fuzzy little lives a program goes off to turn the little things into chickens, or Mallards, or whatever.

I certainly wouldn't have been able to tell whose babies these were had the parents not been nearby: we heard them calling loudly and flying low over the lake all afternoon. One was always with the babies, never more than a foot or two away.

It still amazes me that in only a matter of months, those tiny little balls of fluff will turn into this:

Not just any old babies, but Limpkin babies -- a vulnerable Florida specialty. To see four of them being so well cared for was just as good as seeing some random migrant just passing through.

Down the River

A scene from the St. Johns River, near DeLand.

Fresh-Squeezed Florida is one of my favorite non-birding blogs. Its owner—who blogs under the name Gainesville365—is, like me, a transplanted Californian in Gainesville trying to make sense of this place. So far, she's done a much better job of it than I have--in her two years here, she has explored and blogged about every interesting nook and cranny in north Florida.

So I was delighted to receive an e-mail from her inviting me to join her on a boat tour of the St. Johns River near DeLand. She had gone on the tour there a few weeks before, she wrote, and found it truly special. But Blue Heron River Tours, the young company sponsoring the tours, needed help getting its name and mission known to the public -- would I be interested in joining her, The Florida Blogger, and possibly a third local blogger on one of their tours?

Of course I said yes. We arranged to carpool out to DeLand together and stop at one of her favorite places nearby for a late lunch on the way back. I was thrilled at the opportunity to meet her and talk to her in person, and to see a part of Florida I hadn't yet visited.

But I got a sad e-mail from her shortly before the trip: she had fallen ill, and would not be able to join us. But two other local bloggers I followed would be there and the trip was still on.

Blue Heron River Tours is based at Hontoon Landing Resort and Marina, just down the road from Hontoon Island State Park. The river front resort was pretty and quiet, as was the stretch of the St. Johns River that we explored on our tour.

Our tour boat moved slowly, by design -- both so we could have time to look for birds and animals on the shore, and to protect any wintering manatees in the area from possible collisions. We didn't see any manatees, but birds were plentiful and cooperative. My favorite bird sighting was a pair of Purple Gallinules, which don't occur in Gainesville during the winter--but seemed perfectly happy wintering only two hours away. Here's one of them, just coming into its adult plumage:

Anhingas were everywhere, posing dramatically.

Our guide and captain, Gary Randlett, clearly loved the river and was deeply knowledgeable about its natural history and role in human history. He took us off the main river and down a narrow canal, which he explained had been excavated by loggers in the 19th century. Now it looked utterly natural, as if it had been there forever. Something about that canal struck me as deeply romantic, despite the fact that it existed just so people could find trees to cut down. And I wasn't the only one who thought so: the trees lining the canal's banks -- so close we could touch them -- were filled with colorful painted birdhouses, all put up by locals as memorials or tributes to loved ones:

Towards the end of the tour, we saw an Osprey dining delicately on a fish...

...and a deer grazing close to shore.

Only an hour from us, no doubt dozens of tourists were on a boat trip at Disney World, listening to a canned spiel from a "cast member" and oohing and aahing at mechanized animals and birds. Meanwhile, the real Florida, in all its glory, waited nearly undiscovered for its fans.

Show and Tell

This weekend, I did something I've never done before: I took a non-birder friend birding. This friend is a colleague of mine who's endured God-knows-how-many of my Monday morning weekend birding reports—and she decided that she had to see for herself what all the fuss was about.

So on Sunday morning, I picked her up and took her to La Chua, a perfect place for a birding virgin: a long, flat trail overlooking several waterways, offering guaranteed sightings of Big Pretty Birds. And for the first time in weeks, the birds decided to cooperate with me. (I suspect they decided to make an appearance for my friend's benefit, not mine.)

Near the trailhead, I set up my spotting scope so she could get good looks at the nesting Osprey pair, and while we were there, a Brown Thrasher and a Great-crested Flycatcher lingered close by—close enough for good looks even without optics. Other usual-suspect birds—Northern Mockingbirds, Northern Cardinals, Carolina Chickadees—hopped around nearly, singing loudly and allowing more good looks.

I was counting on a short trip; I figured that a non-birder would grow quickly bored of staring into clumps of foliage for signs of movement. But my friend was surprisingly game—and naturally skilled. We lingered on the trail by the Osprey nest for a good half-hour, watching songbirds come and go.

We moved on towards Alachua Sink: just before the sink, the trail opens up to a flat expanse of prairie and grazing land. There, we saw several Wild Turkeys—a fairly common occurrence there. But today we got unusually lucky: one of the male birds was in the middle of a feverish courtship display:

This dude kept up his prancing and preening for a good half hour, while a nearby female pointedly ignored him. We kept tabs on their seduce-and-snub act while looking out for other birds in the area: a group of three Red-bellied Woodpeckers (a family?), a Blue Grosbeak, and passing overhead, a Sandhill Crane and a Mississippi Kite. Another productive half-hour spent standing nearly still.

Near the sink, we got another good summer bird, and an ideal piece of avian eye candy for a new birder: a Purple Gallinule:

Along the main part of the trail, we saw all the usual egrets and herons (though not the Least Bitterns that others had reported seeing a few days earlier), as well as Wood Storks and the whole range of non-avian wildife known to inhabit the area: a huge herd of bison, wild horses and pigs, a four-foot long soft-shell turtle, and of course, dozens of alligators.

I was happy and grateful that the birds and other critters were all out and about for my friend. Maybe now she understands what all the fuss is about.

Best. Spring Break. Ever. (Part 4)

A Roseate Spoonbill near Merritt Island

Popular wisdom says the world is getting more homogenized by the moment: regional differences in speech, food, and architecture are fading away, and one place in the developed world is pretty much like any other.

But birds tell another story. Merritt Island is only a two-hour drive from Gainesville, yet the landscape and birds are noticeably different. In the real world, little distances mean a lot.

Gainesville, I discovered soon after moving here, has more in common bird-wise with the temperate zones of the American Southeast than with the tropical environment of southern Florida. We don't get flamingos or Snail Kites (or only do so rarely), but backyard woodland birds common here—such as Tufted Titmice—are apparently rare south of Orlando. So our short trip ever-so-slightly to the south gave us taste of what blingy, tropical South Florida is supposed to look like.

On our third day on the Space Coast, we got up (again) at the crack of dawn to spend the morning birding with Glenn's friend Harry. Our trip yielded a large number of Roseate Spoonbills—a prototypical big pretty Florida bird that rarely occurs in Gainesville. (Oddly enough, this WASN"T a lifer for us—a wayward Spoonbill somehow made its way to Orange County (CA) last year.)

Egrets were nesting everywhere, and we saw lots of babies, such as these tiny Great Egrets (the ultimate oxymoron):

Before Harry left us the end of our morning foray, he suggested that we check out the Orlando Wetlands Park if we were up for more birding in the afternoon. As usual, his judgement was impeccable: when we arrived there, we encountered another carful of birders on their way out. They told us happily that they had just gotten 63 species.

Cool!

The Orlando Wetlands (like the Viera Wetlands and my hometown birding touchstone, the San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary back in southern Califoirnia), is a series of ponds intended to filter water before its re-entry and use in civic water systems. Unlike Viera, the Orlando Wetlands wasn't filled with photographers (though it holds just as many photo-worthy treasures). And unlike San Joaquin, it WAS filled with signs warning visitors to stay away from the resident alligators.

But like both of these places, the Orlando Wetlands was filled with nice surprises. A bird I had been trying to get since moving to Florida—and that had up to now eluded me—was the Purple Gallinule. (The closest I've come so far has been running into really old people who still refer to Comnon Moorhens as "Gallinules", which drives me nuts.) Several people have insisted that these could be found (in certain seasons) in Gainesville, but I have yet to see one there. But today we got lucky again, and I got my fourth lifer of our trip!

We also got good views of Bald Eagles hunting, as well as a Wood Stork (a lifer for Glenn), and both American and Least Bitterns. We also had the only-in-Florida experience of encountering an alligator (about 5 feet long) basking on the edge of the path in front of us. (The path was a raised berm separating two of the bird-filled filtration ponds.) The gator seemed to be asleep, but we debated whether or not to work our way discreetly past it, or turn around. In the end we decided to forge ahead, with Glenn wielding his tripod as a potential deterrent.

And the gator slept peacefully through our passage. We wouldn't make very good eating anyways.