Florida - First Posting

Just less than a week ago, I returned from a week in Florida - a welcome respite from the harsh winter "enjoyed" by the Northeast. It has taken a while to process the photos.

There were several days with good birding, and good bird photography opportunities. This post will get things started. It seems appropriate to start with Florida's state bird, the Northern Mockingbird. These birds were singing their joyful mocking songs everywhere we went ...

Northern Mockingbird

First - Wakodahatchee & Green Cay, in the Boynton Beach-West Palm Beach area. Both are the final stage of water treatment facilities. Wetlands with extended boardwalks provide pond and marsh habitat for wetland birds and some of the best viewing opportunities to be found anywhere. Much more will follow from these sites. For now, three residents: Great Egret, Glossy Ibis, Pied-billed Grebe.

Great Egret

Glossy Ibis (non-breeding plumage)

Pied-billed Grebe

From Everglades Nat'l Park, two year-round residents (although maybe these particular individuals will be moving northward for breeding), Black-necked Stilt and Eastern Meadowlark ...

Black-necked Stilt

Eastern Meadowlark

From the Keys, and everyplace else along the coast, Brown Pelican ...

Brown Pelican (adult non -breeding)

And from Dry Tortugas Nat'l Park, a year-round resident - Royal Tern - and a winter resident - Ruddy Turnstone.

Royal Tern (non-breeding)

Ruddy Turnstone (non-breeding)

The "up-close and personal" wetland birds (and some non-wetland birds) will follow in subsequent posts.

It was a week of warm weather and Good Birding!

More Birding on the Dry Tortugas

The Dry Tortugas have a reputation for superb spring birding. In addition to the nesting colonies of tropical seabirds which I wrote about last week, these tiny spots of land in the Gulf of Mexico are a resting place for migrating birds.

Eventually I tore my gaze from the clouds of Sooty Terns over Bush Key, the perching Brown Noddies, and the whisper-like flight of the Magnificent Frigatebirds, and began exploring other parts of Garden Key and Fort Jefferson.

On the pilings of the old pier, Royal Terns perched regally, along with several Black-bellied Plovers, most still coming into the breeding plumage which gives them their name. A single Whimbrel briefly showed its long, down-curved bill before tucking it beneath a wing and dozing off in the warm mid-day sun. On the sandy shore, a pair of Ruddy Turnstones, like the plovers not yet into their variegated breeding plumage, turned over stones and seaweed in search of food. A single Spotted Sandpiper flew from the beach where a pair of Brown Pelicans were preening. A Sandwich Tern alighted briefly near the pelicans.

I turned from my vantage point and began walking through the campground. A woman came from around the copse of trees. “Did you see the owl?” she asked with quiet excitement. “It went this way.”

I fell in step beside her. A few yards on, we paused. Perched in the grass was a Short-eared Owl, the West Indian race of this wide-spread species that I have now seen from Massachusetts to the Hawaiian Islands to a remote speck of Florida. This time, however, I could clearly see the short feather tufts which are mis-named “ears,” and which give the owl its name. After a few minutes, it became tired of being stared at and flew off around the walls of the fort.

Inside the walls of Fort Jefferson, the old parade ground is now a grassy expanse with a scattering of trees and shrubs and the reputation for being a spring-time birding hotspot. Most of the visitors to the National Park missed this quiet attraction. There had been no strong weather fronts so there was no songbird fall-out with birds dripping from trees. As the majority of visitors wandered about the old gun emplacements and strolled the top of the fortress walls, they probably wondered about the couple dozen people skulking about with binoculars and spy glasses on tripods or stretched lazily on the grass staring at a tree.

When I first walked into the parade ground, two things caught my attention. Cattle Egrets stalked through the grass. Accustomed to following cattle and eating the insects which the hooves stir up, these long-legged waders were wading the short grass in search of scarce insects. There are few insects on the keys of the Dry Tortugas, and the Cattle Egrets which stop at Fort Jefferson find such slim sustenance that they sometimes take to chasing, and taking, songbirds instead. These Cattle Egrets stayed in the grass, were wary whenever someone began approaching them, and occasionally found something to eat. At least, I did not see them pursing songbirds. They were in breeding plumage with rusty orange patches on the head, back, and neck. Immigrants from Africa to the Western Hemisphere in the late 1800s, they are now widespread in North America and expanding in other parts of the world.

The Cattle Egrets were not stalking songbirds, but songbirds and shorebirds were not free of danger. A dark, fast moving, pointed wing silhouette swept over the walls, circled the parade ground rapidly, and landed on the top of a tree. At the Putney Mountain hawk watch a dark, fast moving, here-and-gone hawk which prompts a “What was that?” reflex ... is a Merlin. On the top a tree in the middle of the Fort Jefferson parade ground, I focused my scope on a Merlin, perched erect and alert. For the next couple of hours this small falcon flew about the fortress walls and returned to perch. It was an adult male, an experienced hunter, and sooner or later he would return with food in his talons.

The same pattern with intervals of hunting and rest was followed by the Short-eared Owl, which used a tree on the other side of the parade ground as its operational base. This past winter, I watched a Short-eared Owl on Plum Island as it defined, on its own, a day of good birding. The owl and the Merlin would have easily made this day at Dry Tortugas National Park a day of good birding. But remember, they came after the hordes of Sooty Terns, the perching Brown Noddies, and the whisper-like flight of the Magnificent Frigatebirds had already defined the day as a good birding day.

The birding wasn’t over, but it did mellow down. I was finally able to turn my attention to the trees and shrubs harboring the songbirds. The numbers and variety were not great, but each different species was something of a surprise, a discovery, often a welcome anticipation what would be awaiting me when I returned to Vermont: Black-and-white and Yellow-rumped Warblers, Northern Parula, Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Eastern Kingbird.

In our northern climes, we don’t pay much attention to doves or pigeons. They are all Mourning Doves or Rock Pigeons. But in southern Florida there are at least three other doves and pigeons, plus tropical vagrants that might show up at any time. The dove atop a tree in the parade ground warranted a closer look, and gave me my first White-winged Dove since my last visit near a southern border.

As the sun climbed high and the day wore on, I adopted a different birding tactic. Instead of wandering around looking for birds, I found a shady spot beneath a tree with a good view of the bird fountain. I sat and let the birds come to me. It is an effective tactic, maybe more effective than barging about and disturbing the birds.

It worked. A Black-and-white Warbler foraged along a tree branch in its upside-down, nuthatch-like manner. A Palm Warbler wagged his tail in Palm Warbler fashion, causing me to mentally reminisce about the tail-wagging Eastern Phoebe which had begun singing outside my bedroom window just before I left for Florida.

Blackpolls came close. I know them as denizens of the high elevation spruce forests, one of the last migrants to pass through the Connecticut River valley where I usually do my birding. Here they were on a tropical island a few feet above sea level. I had to look twice to be sure I was identifying them correctly.

Seabirds, shorebirds, songbirds, raptors - all capped off with a period of lazy semi-somnolent birding - the Dry Tortugas provided a day of excellent spring birding.

Birding in the Dry Tortugas

The thing about birding is - eventually you have to go places you would not normally go to see birds you would not normally see. Southern Florida is a place I would not normally go. It is flat, hot, humid, gets hit by hurricanes, and is mostly owned by developers who build mile after mile of look alike strip malls. But it does have a few places that intrigue me.

The Florida Keys, for example: a long, curving line of small islands stretching across shallow oceans for some 200 miles, if you take them all the way out to the Dry Tortugas. Several pulp fiction writers base their eccentric characters in these tropical islands and waters. Sampling the setting has long been a draw for me, getting a taste for how these writers filter the Florida atmosphere and scratch at its underbelly, just as Archer Mayor filters Brattleboro and scratches its underbelly.

That’s one magnetism of southern Florida, albeit, a weak one. The other magnetism, a much stronger one is, of course, the birds. There are birds found in the Florida Keys that are very hard to find anywhere else within the borders of the United States except in those barely above sea level, tropical islands.

In mid-April I traveled to southern Florida and I had the good fortune to see some of those birds. They fell into roughly two categories: the ones that were easy to get to but hard to find, and the ones that were harder to get to but easy to find.

The latter category - hard to get to but easy to find - are the birds of the Dry Tortugas. The Dry Tortugas are seventy miles from Key West, the southernmost inhabitable island of the Florida Keys. With no potable water, the keys of the Dry Tortugas are not inhabitable, although that did not deter the U.S. Army from building Fort Jefferson on Garden Key beginning in 1846. It is now a national park.

I had two choices for seeing the birds of these remote pieces of land. One was an expensive, three day, guided birding trip, with overnight anchorage within sight of nesting rarities. The other was a one day trip on a national park concessionaire’s fast boat. I chose the shorter and cheaper trip.

I had hoped that the two hour trip to Fort Jefferson would provide some good pelagic birding. Unfortunately, the boat was too fast and the seas too high to allow for any near approach to birds or use of binoculars. I saw a few gulls near the harbor, occasional gannets and pelicans, and a couple of small groups of egrets, probably Cattle Egrets, crossing the open expanse of ocean. Sometime in the 1870s and 1880s, these remarkable birds crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to South America, and by the 1950s had expanded to North America. Seeing them thirty miles from the nearest land provided a first-hand experience of their ability.

As soon as we docked on Garden Key, the situation was very different, and I quickly joined other bird watchers who were peering across the shallow water at Bush Key. If it weren’t for park regulations, uniformed rangers, and a large sign discernible to all but the most myopic and warning “Island Closed,” it would have been easy to wade over to this place of such intense interest. Bush Key - its sandy shore, scrubby vegetation, and the skies overhead - teemed with thousands of birds. We were looking at a nesting colony for an estimated 25,000 pairs of Sooty Terns and 2,000 pairs of Brown Noddies (a tern relative). On other nearby keys, there are also nesting colonies of Magnificent Frigatebirds and Masked Boobies (closely related to the Northern Gannet which breeds in the north Atlantic). Occasional rarities also get thrown into the breeding mix, but I was quite content simply to look in awe at birds which roam the tropical oceans, coming to shore only to nest, and then do so by the thousands.

The Brown Noddies perched on the old docks of Fort Jefferson, so there were good looks to be had of this bird. Not so the Sooty Terns. They kept their distance; they were on and above their breeding grounds on the nearby key. They were noisy. Old sailors used to call them, “wide-awake.” My source did not explain whether the name came about because they are noisy by day and by night, or because their noise kept everyone else awake day and night. Audubon, who likes to pass along the observations of others, does not record this name from his visit to the Tortugas aboard a U.S. revenue cutter, but does refer to the Sooty Tern as the “Black and White Sea Swallow,” a name which describes the bird’s plumage and swallow-like flight pattern.

On this same trip, Audubon was also told that the other sea swallows “were called Noddies, because they frequently alighted on the yards of vessels at night, and slept there.” That’s one explanation for the name, “Noddy.” The other explanation suggests that the name means “simpleton,” and was given by sailors because it was too dumb to take flight when they approached. Audubon reports that the Brown Noddies stayed on the ground when sailors went ashore to gather their eggs, whereas the Sooty Terns took flight in mass.

It was certainly the case that I saw thousands of Sooty Terns in flight above Bush Key, their noise carrying easily across the water, and that I saw dozens of Brown Noddies perched on old pilings, unconcerned about those strange creatures peering at them with funny things on their eyes.

When I needed to rest from viewing the terns and noddies, I looked up. Above Fort Jefferson there were always a few, sometimes a dozen or more, Magnificent Frigatebirds. They floated effortlessly, as though gravity had no meaning to them. With long, pointed wings that span eight feet, these birds are masters of the air. They can’t walk, they can’t sit, and they can’t swim. They can perch on a tree limb, channel marker, or ship rigging. And they can fly! They soar magnificently, staying aloft for hours, leading some to speculate that they sleep on the wing. Nimbly they plunge to grab prey from the water, “See him now!,” wrote Audubon, “Yonder, over the waves leaps the brilliant dolphin, as he pursues the flying-fishes, which he expects to seize the moment they drop into water. The Frigate-bird, who has marked them, closes his wings, dives toward them, and now ascending, holds one of the tiny things across his bill.”

Or the frigatebird may leave fishing to other birds, preferring to steal from a gull or gannet, even forcing the victim to disgorge from its gullet what it has caught and swallowed. Hence sailors named it for the fast sailing frigate, preferred vessel for pirates and privateers looking to rob a slower moving vessel.

The frigatebirds entranced me. Mesmerized, I watched them suspended on a spot high above. Then a wing adjusted and a bird rode higher in a tight circle, to a great altitude, until it was a small speck. Another drifted, aimlessly it seemed, but calmly and easily riding the winds and air currents. Over and over I forced my attention somewhere else, to the ramparts, the garden like parade ground, the swirling terns or perching noddies. Until another frigatebird dipped nearby drawing my attention as it floated along. It was good birding!

Sometime soon I’ll tell you about the hard to find birds in the easy to get to places.