Spacing Out

Goodies and loot in the exhibition hall at the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival

The coastal areas around Cape Canaveral are know for exceptional birding spots; birding festivals are known for attracting exceptional talents in the craft and science of birding, so it stands to reason that a birding festival just north and inland of Cape Canaveral would be an event to remember. And it was. Sort of.

This year's Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival was a sprawling five-day bird orgy, featuring both Kenn Kaufman and David Sibley as keynote speakers, and every seasoned Florida bird-nerd with a quadruple-digit life list as a field trip guide. Glenn and I got there on Friday afternoon, the third day of the festivities (and the first day I could get away from work), and jumped into the fray.

It didn't take long for us to find birds: in the back of the exhibit hall was a collection of rehabilitated raptors, courtesy of the Raptor Project. The raptors somehow managed to look both fierce and cuddly at the same time:

The star of the show was an Bald Eagle named Uncle Sam, who lost part of a wing tip in a collision with a car. He was prominently perched in front of a large American flag:

The ringleader of the raptor exhibit put on several shows, which ended with soaring music, a spotlight on Uncle Sam, and an affirmation of how wonderful life is in the U. S. of A. It was heartfelt and sincere, though I couldn't help remembering that my first-ever sighting of a Bald Eagle took place in Canada. And the graphic effect of the eagle against the flag made me think of this.

An ironic thing about bird festivals is that I always end up seeing fewer birds than I would in a typical weekend stomping around at home, and this time was no exception—this was largely because all the field trips we would have liked were filled by the time we got around to registering. But we did get to attend a number of informative workshops on warbler and raptor ID, and the effects of weather on bird migration. They were all clearly presented and useful—but just made me want to go out and See Stuff.

The one field trip we managed to get into was focused on ducks at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. We saw hundreds of them—but all were ones familiar to us from California (including a Eurasian Wigeon), and almost all seemed to be miles away; discernable only with spotting scopes. Yawn.

So Glenn and I amused ourselves with birds that were, to our mind, a bit more interesting—such as this immature Roseate Spoonbill, who flew in to feed only feet away:

Just outside the reserve, we also saw some exceptionally bold gulls shamelessly harrassing Brown Pelicans for food:

Just before we returned home on Sunday afternoon, we attended Kenn Kaufman's keynote address, "Pride in the Name of Birding" I suspect he'll want to give it again, so I won't give up too much of it, except to note that it involved a number of shaggy dog tales, some of which involved actual (or imagined) dogs:

On our way out back to our car, and our drive back home, we ran into a couple of Gainesville birding pals—who announced excitedly that just outside the auditorium, a Cattle Egret had just eaten a female/immature Painted Bunting (the latter was already dead; probably from a window collision). And we'd missed it by minutes.

Oh well. What do you expect to find at a birding festival—birds or something?

Georgia on My Mind

Look, it's a warbler! A female Common Yellowthroat at Altamaha Waterfowl Management Area

I was fed up with birding.

Specifically, I was fed up with hunting in vain for fall warblers. My weekly strolls through Paynes Prairie, normally a highlight of my weekends, had morphed into angst-ridden death marches: watching unidentifiable backlit splotches zipping through tangles of leaves four stories in the air only reminded me of my lack of skills/luck/decent bins.

The birds were making me feel like crap. (Yup, it was all their fault! Blasted invisible Golden-winged Warblers!) It was time to step away from those sadistically elusive migrants and do something different.

And luckily, this week I was already committed to the best possible thing for a burnt-out birder: a birding festival! Because birding festivals are a great way to avoid birding.

I've only been to a few festivals, but if these were typical, birding festivals seem to involve the following:

1. Name tags with pictures of birds on them!
2. T-shirts featuring the same bird that's on your name tag!
3. Banquets with no-host bars where $7/bottle wine sells for $5 a glass!
4. Field trips where someone invariably plants him/herself directly in front of you whenever anything interesting shows up!
5. An exhibition hall filled with reps from local birding/conservation groups, reps of major optics companies, and some random guy selling photos/paintings of birds!

The Colonial Coast Birding Festival on Jekyll Island, Georgia, was no exception. The only reason I went was because a couple of my friends here in Gainesville, both serious birders and professional biologists, were among the speakers/presenters, and they had invited me to join them. (They often invite me to join them on their birding road trips; why they'd want such a clueless birder in their midst was a mystery: I figured they just wanted a low-maintenance person to split the cost of their hotel room.) So I navigated the festival's labyrinth of a website, registered for the festival, signed up for several field trips and seminars, and hitched a ride up to Jekyll Island (and shared a comfy hotel room) with my friends.

Jekyll Island is only a 3-hour drive north from Gainesville, so I wasn't expecting the variety of birds to vary too much from what I'd get back home. But I got a few surprises. Roseate Spoonbills are plentiful there, and we saw several on our drive in. (They're a fairly recent arrival on the local scene, I'm told):

The Spoonbills are coastal birds, which might explain why they aren't attracted to the inland delights of Gainesville. But there were yet more treats: on a Saturday morning trip to Altamaha Waterfowl Management Area , our group found a male and female Painted Bunting foraging together: it was a lifer for the birder who first spotted the male; she thought at first that it was a brightly colored flower! But as usual, the little beauty and his girlfriend flew off before I could get any pictures. We also had dozens of Bobolinks—a fairly new bird for me.

Another treat of the Altamaha trip was the group I ended up carpooling with: the friendly and knowledgeable trip leader, the Painted Bunting Finder, and a guy from Athens whose non-birding-related goal was to sample barbeque in each of Georgia's 100+ counties. He loved his food, and for lunch we ended up at a dumpy-looking little roadhouse (not a barbeque) at his suggestion: everyone dug into huge baskets of perfectly fried shrimp and oysters and tankards of sweet tea (too sweet for me and the Painted Bunting Lady, who was from Ohio and unfamiliar with the weirdness that is sweet tea.) I had a fish sandwich because I was broke, but it was still pretty tasty.

After lunch, my new friends dropped me off back at the festival headquarters, at the soon-to-be-demolished-and-rebuilt Jekyll Island Convention Center. This left me an hour to kill before the seminar on shorebird ID that I had signed up for. So I wandered through the exhibit hall, looking for anything that might have changed since the previous day. I found one new thing: where the seven-layer-dip and chicken fingers had been at the previous evening's social hour, there was this:

My friends came back from their afternoon of birding just after my shorebird seminar ended. They wanted to show me around the island, and they wanted to check out the campground, which had a number of feeders and water fixtures that were known for attracting good birds. There, we saw several American Redstarts and Northern Parulas, and at the feeders and birdbath were about four female Painted Buntings!

This was very cool, and suddenly I didn't hate birds, or looking for birds, anymore. I could have stayed there for hours. But we had to leave for the banquet and keynote address (a talk on bird song by Don Kroodsma) . The talk was great, and featured several eminently quotable lines. My favorite: "Science is organized curiosity." I wish I could brand this on my students' foreheads at the start of each semester!

On Sunday, our last day at the festival, I tagged along with my friends on the trip they led, then we had lunch at one of their favorite barbeque places. On the drive back to Gainesville, we listened to the CD that accompanied Kroodsma's bird song book. The variety of songs and calls was fascinating, but for some reason it made us all quite sleepy.

Back in my friends' driveway in Gainesville, I unloaded my gear and asked how much I owed them for the hotel.

"Nothing! It's paid for since we're trip leaders," they said.

Wow. Maybe I don't suck after all. Or maybe I have some redeeming non-birding-related qualities. Either way, it's good to feel normal again.

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.

Bird Hard

Not birding makes one crabby: A Ghost Crab near Fort Matanzas National Monument

Sometimes, I worry that I spend too much time thinking about birds. When I walk across campus to my classes in the morning, I keep my ears open for odd chips and chirps, and sometimes risk being late because I can't help stopping and staring into the trees looking for their source. This, no doubt, makes me look like a total idiot to both my students and colleagues.

This weekend reassured me that I'm not the only person on the planet with birds on the brain 24/7. But it also made me realize that I am, indeed, a complete idiot. There are birders out there who are freakishly good. And there are lots of them.

The cause of my angst was a weekend in St. Augustine, for the fall meeting of the Florida Ornithological Society. This is not the sort of thing I would think of attending by myself, but a couple of my Gainesville birding buddies (one of whom is one the board), invited me to join them for the weekend. They're both fun people and awesome birders, so I was happy to hitch a ride with them, crash in a cheap but comfy motel with them, and spend the weekend talking birds.

We arrived on Friday night, hitched up with another group of birders attending the FOS meeting, and ended up at a surprisingly nice place for an early dinner: a seafood restaurant overlooking the water. We got an outdoor table right at the water's edge, and had surprisingly good food while watching Roseate Spoonbills and Ospreys (among other things) flying over the water. One of the guys had his binoculars with him during dinner, so we were able to ID almost everything we saw as we chowed down on crab cakes, fried alligator, and various interesting salads. We headed back to town (and to the initial "flocking", or social hour, of the FOS conference) just as the sun was setting. Good stuff.

Saturday morning was dedicated to birding field trips. Half of the couple I'd come with was in charge of leading one of the trips, to the inefficiently named Guana Tolomato Matanzas Estuarine Research Reserve. Even the acronym to this place (GTMERR) is a mouthful. But there, we got a Peregrine Falcon, a Black-and-white Warbler, and two bright male Black-throated Blue Warblers, who were bathing in a pond just off the trail from us--a real treat to watch. We also got a white-morph Great Blue Heron, who had been hanging out there for about a week. Still, my favorite sighting of the day was the Roseate Spoonbill flying over the Holiday Inn where the FOS was being held, just as we were standing in the parking lot trying to work out carpool arrangements.

A white morph Great Blue Heron: Note its pink legs

After lots of small talk with other conference attendees on the trip, I realized that over half of them were professional biologists/ornithologists, and the others were hard-core amateurs who'd been birding for decades. And I was an enthusiastic amateur, but still a total idiot.

What made me realize this was the Saturday afternoon program, which involved a "skin quiz": there were actually two quizzes, one for advanced birders, and one for beginning/intermediate birders. Both involved numbered stuffed birds skins to be identified.

I took one look at the table with the advanced skins on it, and realized I was WAY out of my league. At the gentler beginning/intermediate table, I immediately recognized a female Hooded Merganser and felt rather smart. There was something that looked like a Downey Woodpecker, but its bill seemed a bit big. Aha! Hairy Woodpecker! These actually occur regularly in Florida! So this also made me feel kind of smart.

I also correctly figured out a female Yellow-rumped Warbler and a Purple Swamphen, a bird I had never seen (but someone had mentioned them at dinner the night before for some random reason, so it seemed like a reasonable guess).

The take-home lesson here? Whenever you find yourself having a sunset dinner at a romantic waterside restaurant, be sure to work the words "Purple Swamphen" into the conversation. You never know what it might get you.

Saturday afternoon and evening consisted of various interesting bird-related talks. On Sunday, my friendly hosts and I went out for more birding: early morning was slow, but by lunchtime, we had spotted Blackpolll, Prarie, and Palm Warblers, and had spotted both Greater and Lesser Black-backed Gulls—both new birds for me.

By Sunday afternoon, my brain was fried. We returned to Gainesville by mid-afternoon. And then I set off by myself to look for birds once more, this time at Loblolly Nature Reserve, where a number of interesting warblers have been spotted as of late.

Of course, none of them chose to make an appearance for me (but the local mosquitos had their usual feast). I did, however, get a Grey Catbird—another lifer—and a pleasant afternoon in a shady, pretty, place.

Just the kind of peace and quiet I need to get through the long, birdless work week ahead.

Birding Meme: Top 10 Birding Experiences of 2007

Moment #10: Abert's Towhee by the Salton Sea.

Tai Haku of Earth, Wind & Water proposed a nice end-of-the year meme: List your top ten nature moments of 2007. A number of local bird bloggers (including Amy Hooper, Leigh Johnson, and Bob Kaufman) have followed up with a twist: Their top ten birding moments. (Since birding moments are a proper subset of nature moments, technically this would count as the part of the Tai's original meme.)

Since I've grown to consider almost any moment outdoors with a bird to be a treat, there was no way I could rank my favorite moments by preference. So instead, I list them in chronological order:

My favorite birding moments of 2007:

1. January 1: Getting two lifers (a Chestnut-backed Chickadee and a Golden-crowned Sparrow) at Montaña de Oro State Park, near Morro Bay.

2. Second week of January: Getting another lifer (a Yellow-throated Warbler) at Tewinkle Park in Costa Mesa. Most memorable part: all the really kind and interesting birders I met there, also looking for the same bird.

3.Third week of January: Freezing my buns (and feet and fingers) off in 0 degree weather during the hawk –banding trip to the Antelope Valley sponsored by Sea and Sage Audubon. Saw yet more new birds: a Burrowing Owl, Prairie Falcon, and Ferruginous Hawk.

4. March: Yet another lifer at Tewinkle: a pair of Hooded Mergansers. Gorgeous birds! Even better was knowing that interesting birds could be found at a seemingly banal suburban park only five minutes from my place.

5. May: Lurking in the underbrush in Sea Gate Park with seemingly every other birder in Orange County, looking for the Bay-breasted Warbler. Get a five-second glimpse at it. Yet another lifer!

6. June-August: Monitoring the Least Tern/Snowy Plover reserve at Huntington State Beach. Watched Peregrine Falcons scoping them out as potential snacks.

7. September: Looking outside the window of my apartment on a particularly boring afternoon, and finding that the tree directly outside my place was jumping with Black-headed Grosbeaks and Western Tanagers. And suddenly the afternoon was a lot less boring!

8. October: Watching in amazement , from a third-story outdoor stairwell outside my office, as a huge flock of bold Cedar Waxwings flitted about in a tree about an arm’s length away from me—then realizing that one of my teaching assistants had been standing behind me the whole time, convinced that I had totally lost it.

9. November: Spending two days looking for the Roseate Spoonbill in the Santa Ana River near Orange/Yorba Linda. The real pleasure: finally seeing it after two days of looking in vain.

10. December: Getting three lifers (Verdin, Abert’s Towhee, Gambel’s Quail) within five minutes of each other at Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge. Merry Christmas to me!

And happy (belated) New Year to all of you!

Persistence Pays (And So Does Sloth)

Orange County Bird of the Week: The Roseate Spoonbill

There is a fundamental difference between the way bird photographers operate, and the way birders operate. Photographers seek out big, pretty birds in nice, pretty settings. Birders seek out anything with wings. Birders can spend hours looking into thick, shadowy foliage for that special warbler; photographers won't bother because (1) birds are great, but actually looking for birds is boring, and (2) even if that bird is in there, it'll make a crappy shot.

Birders flit from spot to spot in search of some rarity rumored to have been seen there 15 minutes earlier, while photographers plant themselves, like sequoias, in scenic locations, waiting for the birds to compose themselves into a perfect shot. This can take weeks.

I know this because Glenn is a photographer who happens to be deeply into birds, and I'm a birder who occasionally takes photos so Glenn won't think I'm making stuff up when I see something he doesn't.

But when the Roseate Spoonbill first showed up in the Santa Ana River in Orange on Thursday, we both knew we had to see it. It had everything both birdheads and photographers could want: It's a rarity. It would be a lifer for both of us. It's big, pink, and pretty. And it's here.

Since I work at home of Fridays, I set off first thing Friday morning to find it: I knew I was in the right place because of the large number of people with spotting scopes and binoculars pacing up and down the bike path. But after several hours, no one had seen it, and I gave up. After all, I was supposed to be at home working.

Today, both of us headed back to Orange, chasing reports that it had been seen downriver late Friday afternoon. Someone told us it had actually been seen a few minutes earlier UP the river, so we returned to our car and followed a caravan of birders to the intersection of Lakeview and Riverdale. There, we learned that the darned thing had been spotted napping nearby earlier, but had just taken off.

Nevertheless, we slogged up the path, Glenn hauling his usual ton of photo gear, hoping the Spoonbill would return. Several people decided to cross the river to see if it was foraging on the channel on the other side. We started heading back to the car. Sigh. This is precisely the sort of birding that photographers hate.

I debated crossing the river to see what was there, but I knew Glenn didn't want to drag his gear all the way back up the path and across the berm spanning the river. We agreed that I'd go and wave back to him if I saw anything.

Just as I turned to go, something big and pink flew up from the channel: the Spoonbill! Glenn immediately started shooting away—and it circled around and landed in the river, just in front of us!

And I realized that we had totally lucked out: had we given up and left a moment sooner, we would have missed it. Had we persisted and crossed the river with the other birders, we also would have missed that great close-up view of him. We only got to see it because we were slothful and indecisive—too indecisive to even give up.

It's a rare moment when one's vices become virtues—and we plan to enjoy it.