I always like looking at bird eyes, as you know if you’ve gone on my field trips. White Ibis have baby-blue eyes, the eyes of Double-crested Cormorants are azure, the eyes of American Coots are ruby red. Here’s the blood-red eye of a Eurasian Collared-Dove, posted by the bird banders at Skokholm Island, off the coast of Wales. I enjoyed scrolling through the bird photos on their Twitter page: https://twitter.com/SkokholmIsland
Mike Manetz called at about 9:15 this morning from the Bolen Bluff observation platform. He and Frank and Irina Goodwin were looking at a Whooping Crane northwest of the tower. Frank got a photo that shows a blue (and white?) band on the bird’s left leg: https://www.flickr.com/photos/30736692@N00/25957033733/in/dateposted-public/ This is the first Whooper in Gainesville since one that lingered along the La Chua Trail last June and July.
Mike visited Palm Point and Lakeshore Drive on the 20th and found a Cape May Warbler and a Blackpoll Warbler, two species that we can expect to see only during spring migration, as well as an Ovenbird, two Northern Waterthrushes, and a Worm-eating Warbler. A couple of Bonaparte’s Gulls were lingering on the lake. Bobolinks are being seen at Sweetwater Wetlands Park in small numbers – Chris Hooker tallied 31 on the 20th – but should become more numerous later in the month. Listen for its song, which Roger Tory Peterson evocatively described as “ecstatic and bubbling.”
Frank Goodwin photographed a female Red-breasted Merganser at Sweetwater on the afternoon of the 18th: https://www.flickr.com/photos/30736692@N00/26285768580/in/dateposted-public/ It was gone by the next morning, when Mike Manetz overcame a cold long enough to trudge out to where it had been seen:
Summer birds are showing up. There are plenty of Purple Gallinules and Least Bitterns at Sweetwater; John Hintermister found 22 gallinules and 14 bitterns on the 20th. Indigo Buntings, Blue Grosbeaks, Orchard Orioles, and Yellow-billed Cuckoos are being reported all over the county. Felicia Lee had the spring’s first Acadian Flycatcher at San Felasco on the 17th, and three days later Caroline Poli counted four. Barbara Shea had the county’s first Eastern Wood-Pewee of the spring at San Felasco on the 20th. I’m still not seeing a big jump in Mississippi Kite numbers, but my heart gladdened to see one circling over my NE Gainesville neighborhood on the 20th.
Geoff Parks has noticed a singing American Robin in his NE Gainesville neighborhood since early April. If it nests, this will be the third or fourth year in a row that robins have nested in Gainesville.
Speaking of nesting birds, I’ve had mockingbird and chickadee fledglings in my yard for the past few days.
I got one response to my question about starlings in the last birding report, so I’ll try a different species. How about the one shown in the photo above? Eurasian Collared-Dove is a West Asian species introduced to North America in 1974, when a large number of birds escaped from a private home in the Bahamas during an attempted burglary. Within a few years they made it to South Florida and began working their way north. Alachua County’s first was probably the “Streptopelia, sp.” seen by Rob Norton near the intersection of 441 and Williston Road on the December 16, 1990 Christmas Bird Count. However the species wasn’t positively confirmed in the county until John Hintermister saw one standing in the middle of County Road 235 just north of Alachua on March 30, 1992 (which I have no trouble remembering because my darling daughter Sarah was born on the same day). Rare at first – you had to drive out to the town of Alachua to see them in the mid-90s – their numbers suddenly ballooned in the late 90s. Here’s a paragraph from the March 1998 issue of my old newsletter, The Alachua County Birder: “Until Matt Williams reported 39 Eurasian Collared-Doves roosting in one of the Beef Teaching Unit buildings during the CBC, I’d thought there were probably about 20 in the entire county. So in February I telephoned Christina Romagosa, who is studying the dove’s expansion throughout the United States, and asked how many there were, to her knowledge, in our area. After confessing that she’d been as taken aback by Matt’s report as I was (‘had a cow,’ was, I think, the technical phrase she used), having never seen more than 13 together at once (at Butler Plaza), she estimated 50 to 60 for the Gainesville area, and 70 to 100 for the county as a whole.” They were a fairly common and widespread bird for a while, but not any more. Sightings at the Hague Dairy, formerly one of their strongholds, have been occasional at best during the past five years (no double digits since 2010), and sightings anywhere in the county are usually restricted to ones and twos. The only recent exceptions to this were the 21 birds that Adam and Gina Kent found south of downtown Gainesville on the 20 December 2015 CBC and the 64 counted by John Martin at the Beef Teaching Unit on the 15 December 2013 CBC. Does anyone know of any other concentrations of this species in the county, or was their population boom followed by an equally-quick decline?