Category: Birding Reports

Debbie Segal just called at 9:50. She’d walked out the La Chua Trail and was standing at Gator Point, the sharp turn just before the final approach to the observation platform. Flocks of shorebirds, probably forced down by the rain, were moving around on the exposed mud, including two or three Black-bellied Plovers. If my records are up to date, this is only the 12th time that Black-bellied Plovers have occurred in Alachua County. Prior to today, the last sightings were during Tropical Storm Beryl in May 2012. Debbie had also seen 3 Semipalmated Plovers, 1 Semipalmated Sandpiper, 1 Western Sandpiper, 10 Pectoral Sandpipers, Spotted and Solitary Sandpipers, and a lot of Least Sandpipers. Two breeding-plumage Black Terns flew over, and she saw a swallow that “wasn’t a Barn Swallow.” Rainy days in August are an excellent time to find migrant swallows like Bank and Cliff.

We’ve got two new eBird hotspots in town. One is the newly-opened Depot Park, at the corner of Main Street and Depot Avenue. The other is the cluster of ponds near Dick’s Sporting Goods, which are now officially designated the “Butler Plaza Retention Ponds.” Please use these hotspots when you eBird these locations – use the “Find it on a map” function the first time, after that it will be on your personal list of sites – and if you’ve got any old checklists that should be assigned to these hotspots, please edit them and change the location to the new name (again, using the “Find it on a map” function). The use of a personal name for a birding site prevents your observations from being aggregated with others that are reported to the hotspot.

That said, the Butler Plaza Retention Ponds aren’t very birdy right now. Bob Carroll found them dry on the 2nd: “There were no shorebirds anywhere.” And when I drove by this morning after my wife’s orthopedic appointment at Shands, the ponds were all full of water several inches deep and although there were a few waders around the edges I didn’t see shorebirds of any sort.

Craig Walters and Jerry Pruitt both alerted me to the presence of six Roseate Spoonbills in a flooded field along County Road 346A on the morning of the 3rd, about half a mile west of Williston Road.

Dale Henderson reported the first Yellow Warblers from Cedar Key on the 30th: “I’ve been hearing Yellow Warblers for the last 4 or 5 days (I thought!), but finally had two close ones this morning. I’m always happy when I see them.” Alachua County’s first for the season was reported on the 1st by Alison Salas, who also reported two Bank Swallows, which were by nine days the county’s earliest ever. On the 3rd Caroline Poli reported a Cliff Swallow – “Seen well, square tail and buff upper rump patch” – which was also by nine days the county’s earliest ever. (Hey Cliff Swallow, if a Bank Swallow jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?) Debbie Segal found 4 Yellow Warblers at La Chua on the 4th, plus an American Redstart, 10 Prairie Warblers, and a handful of shorebirds, among them a Semipalmated Plover.

If it’s too hot for you to venture outside, you can at least look out this virtual window in west Texas, about 80 miles north of Big Bend National Park, and watch half a dozen hummingbird species at very close range (thanks, Bubba!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pco9UhX3K4w

Dan Ward, a well-known and well-beloved botany professor at the University of Florida, died on the 30th. The obituary mentions that, suitably for a botanist, he named one of his four children Forrest and another Sylvia (Silva is the Latin for forest): http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/gainesville/obituary.aspx?pid=180846639

Here’s a good cause. Alex Lamoreaux writes, “We are a small volunteer group of American and Honduran biologists, geographers, students, researchers, and guides and we plan to spend 17 days this December in Honduras leading a research expedition to the eastern portion of the country. We will work with local conservation pioneers and preserves to survey and promote the wide diversity of bird life in this very special region.” Help if you can: https://www.gofundme.com/28jkvzj8

I lived at home during my college years because my parents didn’t have money for dorm fees or out-of-state tuition, and it was a good thing because I was pretty aimless. One morning during a semester in which I hadn’t enrolled – whether by my own choice or the school’s, I forget – I stumbled across a show on PBS called “The Naturalists.” I think there were four episodes, one about Henry David Thoreau, one about John Muir, one about somebody else, but the one I saw that morning dealt with John Burroughs, and by the time the credits rolled I had decided that’s what I wanted to be, a naturalist and nature writer. We don’t have anyone in the present day comparable to Burroughs. He was famous for writing about nature, but not famous like Roger Tory Peterson (who died twenty years ago today, by the way). Burroughs was enormously famous. It says something about fame, or time, that he’s now utterly forgotten. Just for writing books and articles about birds and nature he was fervently admired and sought out by the likes of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Muir. When Toledo, Ohio, honored him with a statue in 1918, “twenty thousand schoolchildren paraded before him, dropping wildflowers at his feet.” When he died in 1921, the New York Times devoted an entire page to him, the New York State Senate adjourned in his honor, and the New York Evening Post likened his death to “the crash of some patriarchal pine towering above a younger forest.” And yet the memory of him has vanished, even though, perhaps more than anyone else before Peterson, he made bird watching a popular activity. He sounds just like a modern birder in Wake-Robin (1871): “But what has interested me most in Ornithology is the pursuit, the chase, the discovery.” His biographer Edward Kanze wrote, “If I were asked to bestow a single honorific upon Burroughs, I would call him the Father of Recreational Nature Study. In his essays and poems, he encouraged his readers to venture afield for themselves, and to seek the same kind of intimate encounters with plants, animals, and landscapes that had made his own life so full and satisfying.” I was amazed to discover that someone filmed Burroughs two years before his death, walking about and entertaining some visiting children on the family farm in Roxbury, New York, where he grew up: http://www.catskillarchive.com/jb/youtube-john_burroughs.htm

We’re just a few days away from August, when the trickle of migrants will build into a steady stream, and the window of opportunity will open for such rare and beautiful species as Golden-winged, Canada, and Cerulean Warblers. August is also our best bet for migrant shorebirds. By now we’ve probably said goodbye to Purple Martins, Northern Rough-winged Swallows, and Orchard Orioles, and in August the kites will thin out and then disappear as summer draws to an end. We’ve already lost 26 minutes of daylight since the solstice; by the end of August we’ll have lost nearly another hour.

Because of the warbler migration, August marks the beginning of a three-month period during which most of us spend a lot of time in hardwood forests like those at San Felasco Hammock, O’Leno State Park, and Paynes Prairie (mainly Bolen Bluff). We go in looking for birds; we come out with ticks. There are a few ways of handling ticks. You can dress normally and pull the ticks off when you get home, which is not ideal. You can pull your socks over your pants cuffs and powder your lower legs with sulfur or insect repellent. You can treat your clothing with permethrin, which is quite effective – I’ve used it, and I can vouch for it – but it requires spraying your clothes ahead of time (here’s a brief and helpful video: https://vimeo.com/39012753 ). Permethrin also discourages mosquitoes, by the way. Matt Hafner had an interesting way of dealing with the tick problem, which was to wear shorts and sandals so that he could see the ticks crawling up his legs and remove them.

Listen, can I take you aside for a moment? I’ve seen the way you dress. Everybody’s noticed it. Luckily, Gainesville’s own Avian Research and Conservation Institute is holding a fundraiser by selling sweatshirts, long-sleeved shirts, kids’ tees, women’s tees, and regular tees, all emblazoned with a Kite Sighter logo. I beg of you, buy one so we can stop talking behind your back. Please make your purchases by August 4th: https://www.bonfirefunds.com/swallow-tailed-kite-population-monitoring?utm_source=mailgun&utm_medium=pledge_notification&utm_campaign=fund_profile

Jonathan Colburn emailed at 12:35 to report that a retention pond behind the new Dick’s Sporting Goods store in Butler Plaza was “popping” with wading birds. I had an errand to run this afternoon, so I drove by to check it out and I found eleven species of shorebirds present:

Black-necked Stilt 2
Killdeer 17
Stilt Sandpiper 1
Least Sandpiper 2
Pectoral Sandpiper 3
Semipalmated Sandpiper 1
Western Sandpiper 1
Spotted Sandpiper 2
Solitary Sandpiper 3
Greater Yellowlegs 1
Lesser Yellowlegs 3

I commandeered my daughter’s smartphone and, with her help, got bad photos of a couple of the more surprising species. Here’s the Western (with a Least over on the right): https://www.flickr.com/photos/74215662@N04/28470156141/in/dateposted-public/

And here’s the Stilt Sandpiper, a fantastic-looking bird in full breeding plumage: https://www.flickr.com/photos/74215662@N04/28515771396/in/dateposted-public/

Google Maps hasn’t yet caught up with the pace of change in SW Gainesville, but if you take SW 20th Avenue (from the east) or SW 24th Avenue (from the west), you’ll get to SW 43rd Street, at the edge of Forest Park, where the fire station is. Go south on 43rd. The road will curve left as you reach the new Walmart. Follow the road as it curves, and you’ll see Dick’s coming up on your left. Pull into the parking lot at your first opportunity, keeping to the left side of the building, and park near the back. The retention pond is partly behind Dick’s and partly to the left of it.

We’re going to have to keep an eye on this place during the next month or so.

In other migrant news, Teresa Halback saw the fall’s first American Redstart along the wooded driveway of her place near Evinston on July 23rd.

Cathy Bester, a project assistant at the museum, spotted three flamingos flying between Snake Key and Atsena Otie on Sunday the 24th. She reported them to Andy Kratter, who asked her if they might have been spoonbills. She replied, “I had a great view of them as they flew overhead. They did not have the spoonbill beak at all, they were quite graceful. I have seen lots of spoonbills over the past 15 years that I have lived in Florida.” There’s only one previous record of flamingo at Cedar Key, a storm-blown bird that was present for about a week in September-October 2000.

Thanks to Trina Anderson, the Alachua Audubon field trip schedule is going up on the web site: https://alachuaaudubon.org/classes-field-trips/

I spent about an hour and a half (12:30-2:00) at Palm Point today, looking for migrant warblers. I had the place to myself, probably because people assumed that midday would be uncomfortably hot. But it wasn’t. Perhaps because the park is so shady, and is located on the shore of a big lake, conditions were quite pleasant during my visit. I was in search of Prairie Warblers, American Redstarts, and Yellow Warblers, three fall migrants that haven’t yet been recorded in the county this season. I found three Prairies, all in the “Redstart Tree,” the big oak at the Point. I didn’t see American Redstart or Yellow Warbler. It’s still just a tad on the early side for them.

Otherwise it was the usual breeding birds. A cardinal was building a nest. There were lots of Northern Parulas and Yellow-throated Warblers around. Prothonotary Warblers used to nest in the park as well, but during the past couple of years they’ve been seen there only during spring and fall migration (though they’re still present in small numbers elsewhere along the lakeshore). The Prothonotary doesn’t seem to be doing that well around here. Bob Simons tried putting up nest boxes, but they were ignored.

I flushed a roost of 40-50 Fish Crows from the cypresses along the shoreline of the park, and was impressed by how raggedy their wings looked. Adult birds molt their wing feathers after the nesting season, so if you see a bird with notches or gaps in its wings you can be pretty sure it’s an adult; young birds grow a complete set of wing feathers all at once, and keep them for a year, so any bird exhibiting a perfect set of feathers right now is a youngster.

You know the old fish camp at the north end of Lakeshore Drive, near the crew team parking lot? It’s been shuttered and fenced for something like 25 years, but I noticed today that the buildings and dock have been razed. I assumed that a private residence would be going up there, but the signs on the fence say, “Gainesville Area Rowing.” I stopped the car and got a quick photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/74215662@N04/28212924450/in/dateposted-public/

A few migrant shorebirds have shown up at Sweetwater Wetlands Park since my last birding report. John Hintermister saw a Spotted Sandpiper there on the 17th, and Howard Adams saw what was probably the same Spotted plus a Least Sandpiper on the 23rd.

On the 21st Jerry Pruitt noticed two Canada Geese along County Road 346A, about half a mile from Williston Road. Has anybody noticed these before? Were they introduced by the landowner, or could they be wanderers from outside the county? Feral Canada Geese – and these would have to be feral, since they’re in Florida in July – are quite common in Duval, Clay, and Leon Counties, but they’ve never gotten established in Gainesville. A small number of “non-migratory” birds was introduced here in 1971, but they didn’t persist, and I never know whether the geese that occasionally show up here are truly wild migratory birds from up north or just strays from a farm pond in the countryside around Ocala. It’s an arguable point: of the 13 more-or-less credible sightings in Alachua County since 2000, seven took place between March 19th and April 14th, which suggests a spring migratory movement.

A Tree Ordinance Workshop will be held on Tuesday, July 26th at 6:30 p.m. at the Albert “Ray” Massey Westside Recreation Center, 1001 NW 34th Street. Geoff Parks advises, “The outcome of this workshop will discuss how trees are protected and how tree removal is regulated in the City of Gainesville. Interested citizens are welcome to attend.”

Fall migrants are moving through in modest numbers. Black-and-white Warblers have been reported a couple of times, two birds by Jennifer Donsky at San Felasco on the 15th and two more by John Hintermister at Gum Root Swamp on the 16th. Louisiana Waterthrushes, reported earlier in the month, are still being seen, one by Felicia Lee and Elizabeth Martin at Loblolly on the 17th and one by Ben Ewing along the Hogtown Creek Greenway on the 18th. A couple of shorebirds too: I found a Solitary Sandpiper behind the new Walmart in Butlerzilla on the 17th, and on the 18th Danny Rohan spotted a Lesser Yellowlegs at Sweetwater Wetlands Park. No one has yet reported a Prairie Warbler, a Yellow Warbler, or an American Redstart, but they should show up within the next week or two if they’re not here already.

Mike Manetz and I went out this morning and spent a couple of hours standing by the side of County Road 1471 in the spot where I’m pretty sure I saw a couple of Hairy Woodpeckers in late June. No Hairies showed up, but we did see or hear every other species of summering woodpecker in Alachua County as well as Eastern Kingbirds, Eastern Meadowlarks, Common Ground-Doves, a Loggerhead Shrike, and a Swallow-tailed Kite. And Mike, hearing the call of a Brown-headed Nuthatch, used his smartphone to lure a family group of five nuthatches into the top of a pecan tree directly across the road. Otherwise we had no luck at all – as Margaret Morse Nice once put it, “nothing gained but health and enjoyment of nature.”

Speaking of Margaret Morse Nice, recent reading has impressed on me the really astonishing advances in bird identification, identification of all wild plants and animals in fact, since her day. I put up a short blog post about it: http://fieldguide.blogs.gainesville.com/851/how-times-have-changed/

Jonathan Mays sent me a link to an exquisite 20-minute film about a nature photographer’s search for an endangered bumblebee. Watch the first ninety seconds, and if you can turn it off after that you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din: http://www.rustypatched.com/the-film

Gina Kent writes, “Can I put a request out for people to notify us and keep an eye out for Mississippi kite nests? This is the time of the year when orphan chicks come into rehab and we would like to get them safely into foster nests if possible.” You can reach Gina at ginakent222@hotmail.com

Our first fall migrants were three Louisiana Waterthrushes, one found by Debbie Segal while kayaking along the Santa Fe River on July 3rd, one seen by Caroline Poli along Prairie Creek on the 4th, and one spotted by Ben Ewing on the UF campus on the 5th. I’m pretty sure that Black-and-white Warblers are here as well, and maybe Least Sandpipers, but I can’t find any reports on eBird.

The American Ornithologists’ Union has completed its annual bout of mischief making and published another Supplement to its Check-List of North American Birds (to see it, click here, and for a more popular explanation click here). There have been plenty of changes this year, but most of those pertaining to Florida birds have been at higher taxonomic levels like orders and families (and superorders and infraclasses and parvclasses…).

• One of the most noteworthy things the AOU did was NOT change the name of the Purple Swamphen. While eBird has already adopted the split of the swamphen into six species and calls the one resident in Florida the Gray-headed Swamphen, the AOU will continue to refer to all six as a single species, the Purple Swamphen, for at least another year.
• If you have Caribbean Coot on your life list, you’ve got to delete it, because it’s been lumped into American Coot.
• And Leach’s Storm-Petrel has been split into three species, but if you saw it in the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico the species you saw is still called Leach’s Storm-Petrel; the other two are in the Pacific Ocean.
• Other changes have involved interpretation or reinterpretation of DNA analysis. Formerly the shorebirds were split into four families – oystercatchers, stilts and avocets, plovers, and sandpipers – and the sandpiper family itself was split into two subfamilies, sandpipers and phalaropes. Now the sandpipers have been split into five families: (1.) the curlews, (2.) the godwits, (3.) the long-billed sandpipers like dowitchers, woodcocks, and snipe, (4.) the turnstones and the sandpipers of the genus Calidris like Least Sandpiper, Sanderling, and Red Knot, and (5.) the sandpipers of the genus Tringa and their relatives, which includes Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs, Solitary Sandpiper, and Willet, but now also includes Spotted Sandpiper and all the phalaropes. There are a few other changes in the Supplement, but most have to do with changing scientific names and with reshuffling the “sequence,” the order in which birds are listed in checklists, scientific publications, and (sometimes) field guides. You can look at the list of Alachua County’s birds in the updated sequence here. You’ll have fun trying to find where certain birds are hiding. House Sparrow, for instance, used to be the very last bird in the sequence; now it comes a little before the warblers.

Remember to contact Gina Kent if you find a Mississippi Kite nest!

Matt Bruce found a Belted Kingfisher south of the County Road 325 bridge at Cross Creek this afternoon. He writes, “It would have been visible from the bridge, looking towards Orange Lake.” It’s not too late if you start driving now!

Linda Hensley, Danny Shehee, and Maralee Joos found an immature Yellow-crowned Night-Heron at Sweetwater Wetlands Park this morning: https://www.flickr.com/photos/74215662@N04/27968635896/in/dateposted-public/

If the weather cooperates, I’m going to make one last attempt at La Chua this evening, though after the recent rains all the mud may be underwater again.

Mark your calendar: there will be a bird rescue workshop in Cedar Key on July 22nd: http://flshorebirdalliance.org/media/50398/Bird-Rescue-Workshop-Flyer-7-22-16.pdf

Tomorrow evening – that’s Friday, July 1st – we’ll have the June Challenge party, at which winners will be announced and prizes handed out. Please bring a lawn chair and a covered dish. Drinks will be provided. Bob Carroll will be grilling hot dogs. Becky Enneis writes, “The slide show is looking good. So far there are photos of 95 species, and Danny Shehee is out with his camera looking for a few more. I have 175 photos in the slideshow – it’s hard to leave out the great ones, and a lot of those have come in.” Map to Becky’s place is here.

We’ve lost a minute of daylight since the solstice. How depressing.

I think I stumbled across a pair of Hairy Woodpeckers on the morning of the 27th. I was working on the Breeding Bird Atlas (Waldo quad) and while driving slowly along County Road 1471 in search of an Eastern Kingbird I heard a series of high-pitched calls from two birds chasing around in some pecan trees. All the vocalizations sounded like Hairy, not like Downy, the birds seemed on the large side, and the quick glimpse I got when one bird gave me a profile looked like a male Downy/Hairy with what *may* have been a long bill. Then both birds flew east across 1471, across the field, and toward a huge stand of dead trees on the back side of the field (the western edge of the Santa Fe Swamp Conservation Area). I’m not counting them on my June Challenge list, because Downies may have some vocalizations I’m not aware of, but I’m 98% certain they were Hairies. I waited by the side of the road for another 45 minutes, hoping they’d come back, but they never did. If you’ve got Google Earth, you can see where I was at 29° 48.534, -082° 07.789. If not, take County Road 1471 (the one that runs up the east side of Lake Alto) north to NE 134th Avenue, the entrance road to Lake Alto Park. From that point, continue north 2.1 miles on 1471. You’ll pass two houses with addresses out by the street: 17015 on the right, 16784 on the left. The woodpeckers were chasing each other through the trees at 16784. I’d say your chances of seeing them aren’t great, but it’s the best lead we’ve had for the species this June. Two or three years ago we had a pair of Hairies a few miles south on 1471, at John Winn’s LEAFS property. This present location is situated between the big swamp north of Lake Santa Fe on the east and the big swamp north of Lake Alto on the west.

Speaking of the big swamp north of Lake Alto, until yesterday I was completely ignorant that it’s a state-owned conservation property. It’s called the Lake Alto Tract of the Santa Fe Swamp Wildlife and Environmental Area, and it’s 1580 acres in extent. On spying the sign along County Road 1471, I pulled into the parking lot and tried to find a trail, but the whole place was very overgrown and I saw no blazed trees. Recreation on the site is under the authority of the Suwannee River Water Management District. The web site for the WEA is here, with a map here. The map shows a trail system, so I phoned the WEA’s biologist at SRWMD this morning to ask about it, but he wasn’t in his office. Water Management Districts aren’t getting much support under the Scott administration, I know that, so it’s quite possible that they simply don’t have the money for maintenance.

Lloyd Davis writes, “As I entered O’Leno State Park this morning at about 8:15 I heard a Broad-winged Hawk about 100 yards beyond the entrance ranger stop. Of course it is in the wrong county (Columbia), so I didn’t pull over to look for it. I went there to check for Louisiana Waterthrush but didn’t find one.” If you were to stand on the hanging bridge at O’Leno – and you were to have a bit of luck – you might see a Broad-winged circle over the Alachua County side of the river.

I tried for Louisiana Waterthrush at Gum Root Swamp this morning, but without success – though I did see three River Otters, which is success of a kind.

Frank Goodwin and Jane Brockmann independently confirmed two singing male Gray Catbirds at Tumblin Creek Park on the 26th. Jane wrote, “One was singing in plain view (woods to the north of the Picnic pavilion) and the other was deeper in the woods to the west of the Picnic Pavilion (both could be heard singing at the same time).” On the previous day Trina Anderson and Howard Adams saw a third catbird there: “Saw two together on the sidewalk while hearing one farther down the hill, which was confirmed by Howard Adams.”

On the subject of Black-crowned Night-Herons eating other birds, Josh Watson of the Santa Fe Zoo writes, “This is an issue when you see them in captivity as well. I know of one aviary that struggled with that very thing. The herons would roost at the very top of the building, and were therefore almost impossible to remove.” And Rob Bowden sent this photo of a Black-crowned preying on a Yellow-billed Cuckoo: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153971559853751&set=pcb.1043952955653430&type=3&theater

Remember, the La Chua Trail should be open again on the 30th, and the water levels seem to be dropping, so there may be a few early-returning shorebirds visible from the observation platform.

June Challengers, send me your final totals by midnight on the 30th. Go ahead and list the number of AOU-countable birds and then list the non-countable exotics. If, for instance, you’ve seen 99 countable birds and the only non-countable exotics on your list were Black Swan and Helmeted Guineafowl, send me this: “99 + Black Swan, Helmeted Guineafowl.”

Speaking of Helmeted Guineafowl, here’s a question for those of you who have it on your June Challenge lists. Are these free-roaming birds? Lloyd Davis saw them south of the Mill Creek Preserve the other day and he said they were within a fenced yard. If they’re captive and not free-flying (or free-running) birds, they probably shouldn’t be counted. Let me know if you’re counting them and where you saw them; it doesn’t really matter to me, I just want to be sure that everyone’s playing by the same rules. If one person is counting them, everyone should.