From: Rex Rowan <rexrowan@gmail.com>
To: Alachua County birding report
I don’t know if you like this sort of miscellaneous post or not. If you’ve got the time to browse some links, maybe you do. If you’re in a hurry and just want to know the latest birding news, maybe you don’t. I’ll put the (meager) birding news at the top today, and then when I start posting links you can click the little X in the upper right hand corner and get back to whatever else you were doing. (But jump down to the last paragraph before you do that. It’s important.)
Louisiana Waterthrushes are starting to show up. I’d heard one at the north end of Newnans Lake while canoeing with Bob and Erika Simons on June 24th, but we never got a look at it, and two subsequent June trips to Gum Root Swamp failed to find one. The first actual sighting of the summer was made by Lloyd Davis at La Chua on the 5th. He got a photo, which he posted on his Facebook page. I saw the summer’s second this morning, along Camps Canal.
I’ve checked eBird to see if anyone has reported other early-fall migrants, like Black-and-white Warbler, Prairie Warbler, Least Sandpiper, or Lesser Yellowlegs, but not yet; Louisiana Waterthrush is the extent of our fall migration so far.
Remember this Blue Grosbeak that Barbara Woodmansee and I saw on June 21st? The consensus was that it was a one-year-old male in the process of attaining full adult plumage. Females just don’t show that much blue, after all. On the other hand, according to Birds of North America Online, “Apparently incubation is by female only.” If that’s the case, why is this “one-year-old male” sitting on a nest? It’s not just goofing around, either, because it laid at least two eggs, at least one of which hatched on the 8th. The reasonable conclusion seems to be that this is an atypical female with extra blue … well, I was going to say pigment, but as I understand it, blue coloration in birds isn’t based on pigment but on feather structure, so … this is starting to get too scientific for me. Andy Kratter said something about submitting a note on this odd bird to one of the ornithological journals, so maybe he can explain it.
A bird that puzzles a lot of people is the Red-winged Blackbird. Even experienced birders who have no trouble identifying them as Red-wingeds don’t always know why certain females have rosy faces and why some males are still streaked below. This well-illustrated blog entry is chiefly aimed at distinguishing Red-winged Blackbird from Tricolored Blackbird, an ID problem that we don’t face in Florida, but a lot of the captions provide valuable information along the way, for instance, “The strong peachy-buff wash on the face and throat, along with the bright rusty scapulars indicate that the female is an after-second-year bird.”
Ted Floyd is the editor of Birding magazine. I don’t like him. I tell you this because, while I would normally discourage you from reading anything he writes, I thought this piece from 2012 was quite good and worth your attention (despite the whiff of tiresome contrarianism that arises from everything he writes): http://blog.aba.org/2012/07/most-wonderful.html
The Barr Hammock meeting did not go well, and in three months the majority of the Commission will vote 3-2 (Baird, Chestnut, and Pinkoson vs. Hutchinson and Byerly) to close the loop trail unless they are convinced otherwise. I’ll send more information later, but this is something that’s going to depend on the public EXPRESSING outrage, not merely BEING outraged. And I think ultimately that will involve showing up at a BOCC meeting, not just sending an email. Meanwhile emails should not cease, because it’s simply intolerable that a private citizen should be able to control the public’s access to public property: bocc@alachuacounty.us