From: Rex Rowan <rexrowan@gmail.com>
To: Alachua County birding report
Mark your calendar! Sweetwater Wetland Park – what we’ve been calling the sheetflow restoration area – will open to the general public on weekends beginning on Saturday, May 2nd. Hours of operation will be 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. on both Saturdays and Sundays, and the admission price will be $5.00 per car. It’s not going to have enough parking places!
There’s a field trip to Sweetwater Wetland Park (SWP) tomorrow, your last chance to bird the place without paying an admission fee. It’s actually a Santa Fe Audubon field trip, but they’ve extended an invitation to Gainesville birders to join them. Be at the SWP entrance at 8:30 – not the usual double-gated entrance, but the single gate about a hundred yards to the north – and be prompt, because Debbie Segal will have to lock it after everyone gets there. She wanted to scout out the birding conditions before the field trip, so this afternoon she went for a drive around the cells, and she invited Dotty Robbins and me to come along. In the overflow channel that borders the cells on the north side we found shorebirds of a dozen species in a muddy, grassy tract that was partly flooded. There were lots of Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs, lots of Solitary and Least Sandpipers, Killdeer, two Semipalmated Plovers, two Semipalmated Sandpipers, three Long-billed Dowitchers, a Pectoral Sandpiper, a Stilt Sandpiper, and (tying the county’s early record) a White-rumped Sandpiper. There were lots of birds out there, and it’s possible that we missed something. In a different part of the park we counted 63 Bobolinks. Other sightings included Limpkins, Least Bitterns, an American Bittern, a Purple Gallinule, and Northern Rough-winged Swallows.
I suspect that all those birds will still be around when SWP opens on May 2nd, so don’t feel that you have to give up tomorrow’s trip to Hickory Mound Impoundment and Steinhatchee Springs WMA: https://alachuaaudubon.org/event/hickory-mound-wildlife-management-area/?instance_id=405
Earlier in the day I’d led the community education birding class out La Chua. We got most of the expected birds, and nothing unexpected: Blue Grosbeak, Indigo Bunting, Yellow-breasted Chat, Purple Gallinule, and Least Bittern. A couple of us stayed late and added a Summer Tanager and two lingering winter birds, Sora and Northern Harrier, to the day’s list. The Alachua Audubon Society field trip to Bolen Bluff, also held this morning, found American Redstarts, Black-throated Blue Warblers, a Cape May Warbler, Bobolinks, and a Whooping Crane.
People are reporting Rose-breasted Grosbeaks at their feeders. Evelyn Perry had two in her yard near the Kanapaha Prairie on the 23rd, and Bob and Erika Simons had two at their place in SW Gainesville on the 24th. My favorite Rose-breasted Grosbeak report, however, was the one Ron Robinson submitted on the 22nd, because it was accompanied by a photo of a grosbeak feeding right next to a Pine Siskin, not a combination we often see around here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/74215662@N04/17234681116/
If you remember, a pair of American Robins nested in Geoff Parks’s NE Gainesville neighborhood last summer. They seem to be back. Geoff is seeing as many as three hanging around, weeks after the migrant robins have gone north. Even more interesting, Mike Manetz has heard one singing every morning in his NW Gainesville neighborhood, about a mile from Geoff’s place. I suspect it’s one of the offspring from last year’s nesting. But does it have any chance of finding a mate? And, if so, isn’t any female robin that’s still in Gainesville likely to be a sibling?
Finally, excuse the self-indulgence, but the next five paragraphs are from a diary entry, written twenty years ago tomorrow, describing a significant event (well, significant to me and Mike Manetz) that occurred twenty years ago today:
“Since September Mike Manetz and I have been working on a pamphlet, A Birdwatcher’s Guide to Alachua County, Florida. We really started writing around the end of December, and had most of the text done by last month. At this point Jonathan [Vaughan, a high-school friend of mine] was supposed to have taken over and, using his training in layout and graphic design, made a book out of it, but his father developed pancreatic cancer, and Jonathan spent every spare minute at his bedside. When his father died earlier this month, Jonathan really got down to work on the book. I went up to Jacksonville and spent most of a weekend in front of his computer, changing this word, asking him to alter that map; and then last Thursday he brought the computer down and Mike and I looked over everything, suggested a few last-minute changes, and got the final version printed out right there in my dining room. The next morning I delivered it to Xerographics, an inexpensive photocopying shop Mike had made a deal with.
“Yesterday afternoon at 5:30 Mike and his 10-year-old daughter Ashley met me at Xerographics. The pamphlet was still being trimmed and boxed, so we stood around nervously, wondering if they’d left anything out, or stapled anything in upside down. A UF biologist with a young son was there also, conferring with the staff about a Spanish-language folder on a rainforest conference to be held in Peru. When the boxes of our pamphlets were brought out, it took him less than ten seconds to walk over and ask, ‘Can I buy one?’ Mike said sure, and after commenting about the relatively high price (Mike replied, ‘How many thousands of hours of work did we put into this, Rex?’), he wrote us a check. So Peter Polshek was our first purchaser. And he made us autograph the title page. Mike said, as we were walking out the door, ‘I was real cool when he asked to buy the book in there, but I want to tell you, I just barely kept myself from jumping up and down.’
“So how did it feel to have the book in our hands? Partly good and partly disappointing. Here was this thing we’d been visualizing for so long, and we could actually heft it in our hands, and turn the pages, and see our pictures on the back cover and our names on the front. But they’d used cheap paper, so that the back of each sheet showed through, and some of the pages were crooked, and several of the covers had shoddy trimming jobs that gave them frayed edges. So that took the edge off our giddiness – but still I couldn’t keep my hands off the books on my drive home. I kept picking them up and looking at them.
“Last night Nina and the kids and I went over to the Manetzes’ and colored the pamphlet covers. Each cover depicted a Mississippi Kite drawn by Diana, Mike’s wife, and we colored in each of the 249 remaining kites’ eyes with red magic markers.
“This morning I showed the books around the office. Everybody smiled and went, ‘Oh!’ and leafed through it briefly, but no one seemed really interested. Mike, on the other hand, called at about 8:30 to tell me he’d already sold five copies at the school where he teaches.”
Of course that 1995 edition, with its 64 pages, 12 maps, and species accounts for 227 annually- and irregularly-occurring birds, made way for the 2006 edition, with 128 pages, 42 maps, and species accounts for each of the 340 bird species ever recorded in Alachua County. It’s about time for a third edition, but Mike and I are now very old (a surprise to many people who see that 1995 photo on the back of the book) and our vital energies are waning, etc. Who knows, though? We may have one more edition in us. Meanwhile, the 2006 book is still available at Wild Birds Unlimited.
Incidentally, Kevin Dailey is working on a similar project for Duval County: http://birdingjacksonville.com/ It’s quite impressive. Click on “Locations” and “Species” on the menu. It’s a work in progress, and I’m really looking forward to seeing it when he’s done.