From: Rex Rowan <rexrowan@gmail.com>
To: Alachua County birding report
First of September. By the end of the month we’ll have more darkness than light. Sounds right existential, don’t it?
Josh Watson writes that on the 29th he and Dan Gualtieri saw a Sora at Sweetwater Wetlands Park “off the pavilion boardwalk on the right before the split.” That ties the early record set in 1997 when Christina Romagosa found one dead in the road near Lake Alice.
I think we all had high hopes for Sweetwater Wetlands Park as a shorebird hotspot this fall, since it was so good this spring. But August is over, and with it the peak of shorebird migration, and nothing ever showed up there because the water was too high. We had an unusually rainy summer, of course, but summer is almost always rainy to some degree. Will the water be lower during a normal summer? Let’s hope so. We could use a reliable shorebird spot around here.
Migrants are moving through in good numbers and good variety. No one has reported a Golden-winged yet, but they’re certainly out there.
Sam Ewing reported the fall’s only Chestnut-sided Warbler (so far) on the 25th and the fall’s only Blackburnian Warbler (so far) on the 27th, both at his NW Gainesville home.
John Martin had an excellent day at the Bolen Bluff Trail on the 30th, tallying a dozen warbler species. His best were a Blue-winged Warbler, two Worm-eating Warblers, five American Redstarts, two Hooded Warblers, and a Kentucky Warbler. He writes, “Jacqui Sulek accompanied me for half the route and found the Blue-winged Warbler early where the trail initially forks. I hung out longer at the Prairie fringe, walking the woodline east and west of where the trail levels out on the basin; I found the Kentucky to the east, about 75 feet past the ‘trail closed’ sign, just past where the dog fennel opens into a stand of trees – it appeared after I played a screech-owl call.” He got a very nice picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thermalin/20826157900/in/dateposted/ Craig Faulhaber was out there on the same day and found a second Kentucky, “about 3/4th of the way down the left-hand (north) fork of the trail, on the prairie rim (north) side of the trail.”
Also on the 30th, Felicia Lee and Elizabeth Martin birded the Lake Wauberg area: “At the boardwalk, we saw several American Redstarts, a Yellow Warbler, and a Prothonotary. We also ran into Frank Goodwin, who said he’d seen a large flock of Prairie Warblers as well as a Blue-winged Warbler off the Lake Trail, so we went up there to check it out. We saw only 3 or 4 Prairies, but we did find the Blue-winged and over a dozen Northern Parulas pretty easily. Fun morning!”
ALSO on the 30th, Becky Enneis spotted a Kentucky Warbler in her back yard in Alachua.
I got out to Bolen Bluff about five hours after Andy Kratter saw the Cerulean Warbler on the 27th. He’d left a bunch of sticks in the middle of the trail where he’d seen the bird, spelling out “CERW,” the banding code for Cerulean Warbler, but I couldn’t locate it in that area. I kept walking till I got to the fork in the trail, and then I heard a bunch of birds in the little pond off to the left. Walking over to the pond, I found a mixed feeding flock that included nine warbler species, among them one Blue-winged Warbler as well as Andy’s Cerulean, which was an adult male. After enjoying it for a while I walked a short distance down the right fork of the trail in search of a Kentucky Warbler that Felicia Lee and Elizabeth Martin had seen five days earlier. I wasn’t able to relocate it, so I started back to the car. Along the way I met Will Sexton and Mitch Walters, who were in search of the Cerulean. I led them to the pond where I’d seen it. Only five minutes had elapsed, but every last bird in that feeding flock was gone. We spent the next half-hour or so searching the adjoining woodlands – Dotty Robbins showed up to help us – but we never relocated the flock.
American Goldfinches don’t usually get here until later in the fall – I almost never see one until November – but in the past week early birds turned up in two locations. Dennis Knisely of High Springs photographed two at his feeders on the 26th (still there on the 30th) and Ron Robinson photographed one at his place at the west end of Gainesville on the 29th (not seen since). My records show only one previous August record in the county, at Ron’s place on August 28, 1996.
One thing about eBird. Though I fully support it (I’m a regional reviewer), it does sort of give the impression that birding didn’t exist until five years ago, since 99.9% of all birding records date from 2010 or later. Luckily John Hintermister, who’s been keeping personal records for Alachua County since 1968, has been entering his old checklists into eBird ever since he signed on. So if you do a search for Golden Eagle in Alachua County, you’ll see that it has in fact been recorded here, in 1974 at Newnans Lake and in 1981 at Paynes Prairie. But if John hadn’t entered his records, you wouldn’t know that Golden Eagle had ever been seen here at all (in fact there have been six reports over the years, the most recent in 1999, but the others weren’t entered into eBird). If you do a search for Brewer’s Blackbird, you’ll find three reports, one by Robert Repenning along Wacahoota Road in February 1977, and two by John Hintermister at Paynes Prairie, one in December 1969 and one in February 1990. In fact Brewer’s Blackbird was annually recorded on the Gainesville Christmas Bird Count from 1970 to 1990 in numbers ranging from 1 to 1,000 (average 151). So eBird is of limited use if you want to know the historical status of a species. If you’re only interested in recent trends, or in what’s being seen right now, it’s gangbusters.
Remember to mail those postcards that came in The Crane!