From: Rex Rowan <rexrowan@gmail.com>
To: Alachua County birding report
Not content with finding good birds in the world at large – he discovered Duval County’s first-ever Green-tailed Towhee on the 3rd, and what may be Florida’s first-ever Bermuda Petrel in December (if it’s not North America’s first-ever Barau’s Petrel) – Sam Ewing is now discovering good birds online. Looking over an anonymous birder’s eBird checklist from a walk on the La Chua Trail yesterday, he realized that a photograph labeled “Orange-crowned Warbler” did not, in fact, show an Orange-crowned Warbler, but Alachua County’s second-ever Bell’s Vireo! Here’s the checklist: http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S28009914 (The error may have been corrected by the time you see this.) Using my special eBird-Reviewer powers, I’ve contacted the anonymous birder to ask exactly where the bird was seen, and I’ll send out an update once I get the answer (or find the bird myself). It was almost certainly somewhere along Sparrow Alley, since the observer wrote that he saw White-throated Sparrows “on the path going right after the barn (away from boardwalk) about halfway to power line trail.”
Lloyd Davis discovered a Le Conte’s Sparrow at the Hague Dairy this morning. If you go in the “back entrance” of the dairy from NW 59th Drive – turning off 59th and going through the gate – there will be a small field on your right, just before the pond. There are some big mounds of dirt in that field, and Mike Manetz called to tell me that the sparrow was in the brush at the foot of the mounds. (If you enter the dairy from the front entrance, off County Road 237, follow the driveway all the way past the office, the silo, and the pond; the field will be just before the gate on your left.)
David Kirschke writes that yesterday he saw both the Black-chinned Hummingbird at the Ewings’ place and the Brown Creeper at Tuscawilla Prairie.
Remember the wading birds’ abandonment of Seahorse Key last year, and their re-nesting at Snake Key? I asked Vic Doig of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service if he’d noticed any signs of nest-building yet, and he replied, “There is much more activity at Snake Key but it is early yet. We put out a bunch of nesting bird decoys this week in an effort to lure birds back to Seahorse Key.”
Greg McDermott emailed, “I had a dream the other night that the AOU issued an official ‘Birds of Alachua County’ list. It included only the 15 species that everyone takes pictures of at Sweetwater Wetlands Park. Pretty much invalidates your last two and a half decades of work. Sorry.”
I hope everyone was gladdened to see that the County Commissioners upheld the comprehensive plan against the Underpants Gnomes Logic of Plum Creek (Phase 1: Clear forest near Windsor. Phase 2: ?? Phase 3: East Gainesville prospers!). Please remember to thank Commissioners Byerly, Cornell, and Hutchinson.
A brief but worthwhile essay by BirdFellow’s Dave Irons on the tradition of mentoring in birding: http://www.birdfellow.com/journal/2008/12/19/a_tradition_of_mentoring