From: Rex Rowan <rexrowan@gmail.com>
To: Alachua County birding report
We started the 2015 June Challenge at 6:15 this morning at Longleaf Flatwoods Reserve with 24 participants. We saw our two target birds, Common Nighthawk and Bachman’s Sparrow, but it was fairly quiet otherwise.
We went on to the Windsor boat ramp, where we found Bald Eagle, Laughing Gull, and Limpkin. However our best bird, a singing Prairie Warbler, never gave us a look. I may go back tomorrow morning and try for that one again.
Powers Park and Palm Point produced the expected birds, but the only thing even slightly out of the ordinary was a flyover Cooper’s Hawk in the parking lot.
At La Chua we were confused by a sign that said the trail is closed, but it turned out that only a section was closed: the shortcut that allows you to bypass the boardwalk. It was about 10:00 by the time we got there, and we weren’t sure that the birds would still be singing, but there was a brilliant male Indigo Bunting near the boardwalk and several singing adult male Orchard Orioles, one of which had fledged two or three young. We were going to follow the old Sweetwater Dike down to the first bend and try for King Rail and Purple Gallinule, but we ran into Howard Adams, Barbara Mollison, Linda Hensley, and Brad Hall coming from the opposite direction, and they told us that Alachua Lake was alive with birds. So we made the long hot walk to the observation platform and found that the water level is falling, exposing a lot of mud around the edges of the lake. We saw Mottled Ducks (some with ducklings) and three Blue-winged Teal. We saw Glossy Ibis, Wood Storks, and Roseate Spoonbills. We saw Purple Gallinules and Least Bitterns (Least Bitterns were so frequently seen that we got tired of them). And we saw some lingering shorebirds. Not just the expected Black-necked Stilts (some of them sitting on nests) and Killdeer, but a Greater Yellowlegs, a Semipalmated Plover, and a Least Sandpiper. Then Dean Ewing pointed out a little swimming bird that he didn’t recognize to his son Sam, and Sam identified it as a phalarope. After a lot of peering through telescopes and long-distance photography, we all agreed on Red-necked Phalarope. It wasn’t an easy bird to find, because it’s quite small and spent most of its time swimming around in a weedy area where it was partially hidden from view. I think I’ll go back tonight, when the glare isn’t so bad, to see if I can get a better view and to see if anything else has shown up. There’s a lot of mud out there!
We finished up at 1:00 with a Yellow-breasted Chat a couple hundred yards out from the old horse barn. Some people had more, some people had fewer, but I ended the morning with 59 species.