GAINESVILLE’S OWN Avian Research and Conservation Institute is featured in this beautifully-illustrated article from Audubon:
https://www.audubon.org/news/the-secret-lives-swallow-tailed-kites
Category: Birds and Birding
AMERICAN KESTREL BANDING
Date: May 21, 2019 at 11:20 AM
Subject: Ichetucknee Kestrels
Bob,
I participated with Richard Melvin and Sam Cole in banding your kestrel chicks on Saturday. There were 2 males and 3 females, and they were all good sized and Richard said they were a “good brood”. By which he meant that they were calm, mainly because they were well fed. Their parents, both, were taking very good care of them. He also said 5 is the top number for any kestrel brood, so these birds were top notch. I am so thrilled about this since I’ve been helping check boxes there for a while and this is the first year since 12, I believe, that there have been any eggs or chicks.
I thought you might like to see this picture of one of the chicks. I had never seen a chick before and I was delighted.
Have a great summer, Bob!
Valerie Thomas
KESTREL CHICK PHOTOS
Bob Simons has provided us with “some kestrel baby photos taken today in boxes in NW Alachua County plus one just over the line in Gilchrist County.”
SIDNEY WADE ON BIRDNOTE
Poet birder Sidney Wade has recently been featured on a podcast called BirdNote. You can listen to the episode or read the transcript by following this link.
KESTREL NEST BOX PHOTO UPDATE
March 28, 2019 we went to the Metzger Tract by Watermelon Pond (where the burrowing owls are) and found and photographed two boxes being used by kestrels, one with a male kestrel incubating eggs and the other with four eggs. On last Tuesday, we went to the other side of Watermelon Pond on the Division of Forestry land and found four boxes occupied with screech owls incubating eggs. The week before, we found eight boxes with kestrel eggs, most being incubated by female kestrels. We still have more boxes to check, but it looks pretty good so far, and we are learning some interesting things For instance, two boxes on utility poles in plain sight of each other and only perhaps 150 yards apart on the Shay property each had female kestrels in them incubating 5 eggs. Kestrels arn’t supposed to nest that close together. Attached are some of the photos we have been taking with our new pole camera.
Bob Simons
SHE’S GOING “WHERE THE BOYS ARE.”
by Rex Rowan
On Wednesday, January 23rd, at the Tuscawilla Prairie, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service captured a 3½ -year-old female Whooping Crane wearing blue-over-yellow leg bands. Born in Lake County in 2015 – one of only a few Whooping Cranes hatched from a wild nest in Florida – she was about a year old when she found her way to the Evinston-Micanopy area. She remained there for the next two years, occasionally making brief forays to local crane hangouts like Paynes Prairie or the Kanapaha Prairie, and she was often seen by drivers on US-441 as she foraged among the marshy potholes of Tuscawilla. Because her chances of finding a mate there or anywhere else in North Florida were nil, it was decided to relocate her and some other unmated Florida Whooping Cranes to White Lake Wetlands Conservation Area in southwest Louisiana. There she’ll join a population of non-migratory cranes that currently numbers 59, and there, hopefully, she’ll find a mate and get down to the important work of making more Whooping Cranes. White Lake Wetlands, which is more than three times the size of Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, supported a breeding population of wild Whooping Cranes as recently as the 1940s. It seems a promising place for such a project.
Our other resident bird, identifiable by blue-over-silver leg bands and known to biologists as “1644,” was also a female. She was hatched in 2006 in Lake County by captive-reared cranes that had been released in central Florida in the 1990s – like the Tuscawilla bird, she was the product of a wild nest. She visited Alachua County for the first time in 2009, and liked it so well that she returned every year thereafter. In spring 2015 she decided to stick around. Beginning in June of that year and continuing through February 2017, she could be seen almost every day from the observation tower at the end of the La Chua Trail. In March of 2017 she relocated to Sweetwater Wetlands Park, where she spent the month thrilling visitors at very close range. And then … we don’t know. A crane was sighted near the Paynes Prairie visitor center in April and June, but its identifying leg bands could not be seen, so it might have been the Tuscawilla bird. There have been no positive sightings of 1644 since April 11, 2017. We can only hope she’s still alive somewhere.
As for Tuscawilla, we wish her many more years of life and many offspring. But it’s sad to realize that, for the first time since June 2015, Alachua County’s resident Whooping Crane population is zero.
Gainesville Sun story on crane relocation: https://www.gainesville.com/…/whooping-crane-may-be-relocat…
Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Whooping Crane page: http://www.wlf.louisiana.gov/wildlife/whooping-cranes
White Lake Wetlands Conservation Area: https://en.wikipedia.org/…/White_Lake_Wetlands_Conservation…
NEST BOX SPY CAM!
Thanks to a grant from Florida Power and Light, Alachua Audubon is the proud owner of a new pole camera! This device, which has a lens attached to the top of the pole and a display screen attached near the bottom, allows us to peek inside the 130+ American Kestrel nest boxes that we’ve put up all across north-central Florida in order to monitor the progress of the birds nesting inside. Earlier this month an Audubon group tried out the pole camera at a tract of conservation land in Suwannee County. You can share their discoveries in the attached photos.
Read more about the kestrel nest box program on pages 14 and 15 of the January/February issue of the newsletter.
Recognizing John Hintermister
by Debbie Segal, extracted from Rex Rowan’s History of Birding in Alachua County
The Alachua Audubon Society wishes to recognize the longest-standing member of Alachua County’s birding community. After many decades of leading field trips for AAS, the St. Mark’s field trip in early January will be John Hintermister’s final Audubon-led field trip.
John was a trail-blazer to birding in Alachua County and his contributions to birds, birding, science, and conservation are immense.
As a young boy, John was inspired to watch birds when two women would take him on birdwatching excursions. By the time John was 11, he was hooked on birds. John and his brother would pedal their bikes to Lake Alice and by noon, would sometimes list 100 species. When describing this, John said, “Now I don’t know if we identified them all correctly, but we would get 100 species.” They may well have identified them correctly because upon seeing a bird, they would stop and read aloud the entire description from their Peterson field guide.
In January of 1960, John attended the inaugural meeting of the AAS. Among its charter members were Oliver Austin, Marjorie Carr, J.C. Dickinson, Jr., and 16-year old John Hintermister. Some of the first year’s field trips included River Styx, Lake Alice, the pinewoods north of the airport where Red-cockaded Woodpeckers nested, Devil’s Millhopper, Paynes Prairie, and San Felasco Hammock. Both Paynes Prairie and San Felasco were still in private ownership.
During the 1960’s and 70’s, the National Audubon Society sponsored a series of nationally-touring nature films, and these films served as AAS’s program meetings. John attended many of these early Audubon programs. Roger Tory Peterson was a regular on the tour, and when he visited Gainesville every 2-3 years, the University Auditorium was booked to hold the crowds. On one of those occasions, John remembers handing his tattered and well-used field guide to Peterson to sign, and Peterson responding, “Now this is the way I like to see the field guide.”
The first Gainesville Christmas Bird Count (CBC) began in 1957, and during its infancy, the CBC had few participants and they birded only from sunup until lunchtime. There were no assigned territories, no team captains, and no organization of any sort. In 1972 at the age of 29, John became the official compiler of the Gainesville CBC. After reading in Peterson’s Book, Birds over Americaabout the methodical way in which the Bronx CBC was conducted, John sought to emulate it for the Gainesville count. He instituted dark-to-dark counts. He cut up a topographic map of the count circle to make territories, appointed team leaders, and assigned them important birds to find in their particular tracts. John served first as compiler of the Gainesville CBC from 1972 – 1981 and then as co-compiler with Howard Adams from 2003 until 2014. During the interim 21-year period from 1981 – 2003, the co-compilers were Craig Parenteau and Barbara Muschiltz.
In the mid-70’s John began teaching birding classes through SFCC. There is no telling how many people John inspired through these birding classes, but we know that Mike Manetz and is one. Those SFC birding classes are still taught by AAS and now are led by Charlene Leonard and Cindy Boyd.
In 1985, John became the original Alachua County coordinator of Florida’s Breeding Bird Atlas, and it was during this atlas survey that Hooded Warblers were discovered breeding in San Felasco Hammock. He also served as president of AAS and a long-time board member. During his almost 6 decades of involvement with AAS, he has led a countless number of field trips.
John once said, “There are birdwatchers and there are people who put their lives on hold in order to bird.” We know which category defines John. If there is one person who has influenced the birding culture in Alachua County more than anyone else, I think we would all agree, it is John Hintermister.
AAS is sincerely grateful to John for his dedication to all things birds, his unwavering enthusiasm as he has mentored a generation of birders, and his almost 60 years of devotion to AAS. John has been presented with a life-time membership to AAS.
DUCK TALES
by Rex Rowan, posted to Facebook November 1, 2018
At about lunchtime on October 30th, Rob Norton discovered a drake Eurasian Wigeon at Sweetwater Wetlands Park. He passed the word, and several local birders got to see it before the day was out – including Tom Tompkins, who took the photos below. It hasn’t positively been seen since, though a bird showing one of the field marks was briefly glimpsed the next morning, flying towards Paynes Prairie.
As the name implies, Eurasian Wigeons are native to Europe and Asia. Those that stray to eastern North America – a small number every year – are presumed to originate from a breeding population in Iceland. This was only the third in Alachua County’s history. There are stories connected with the other two.
The county’s first ever was shot by Dr. A.L. Strange at Orange Lake on December 26, 1931 and mounted by a taxidermist. Robert McClanahan, a UF undergraduate compiling an official bird list for the county, tracked down the mount in 1934 – it had lost its head by then – and secured it for the museum. Unfortunately the specimen was discarded in 1962.
The county’s second, a female, was discovered by Phil Laipis at the Hague Dairy on December 22, 2004. Puzzled – the female is nondescript – he found another birder at the dairy that morning, Pat Burns, and showed it to her. Pat suspected that it might be a Eurasian Wigeon, and she notified John Hintermister, Gainesville’s most knowledgeable and experienced birder. John drove over, examined the bird, and pronounced it either an American Wigeon or an American-Eurasian hybrid. Hearing that it was either an American Wigeon, which is common, or a hybrid, which is not countable, the local birding community stayed home in droves. Except for Steve Collins, who took several photos and circulated them among British birders. They were unanimous: it was a Eurasian Wigeon, the county’s first in 73 years! But by the time the Brits notified Steve of their conclusion, the bird had flown, so no one else got to see it. John is cheerfully unrepentant of his part in this fiasco, and when reminded of it he laughs uproariously and says, “Serves you right for not going to look at it!”
