Tag: Roseate Spoonbill

The second weekend of the June Challenge, or, Tern Tern Tern

Posted on by Rex Rowan

From: Rex Rowan <rexrowan@gmail.com>
To: Alachua County birding report

Ted and Steven Goodman and Felicia Lee found a Yellow-crowned Night-Heron at Possum Creek Park on the 9th, “off the trail in the extreme SE corner of the park in the sinkhole wetland where there are a few egret nests. The heron was in a maple tree with lots of moss.”

Tropical Storm Andrea brought us nothing whatsoever on Thursday evening, apart from some glorious weather. A few of us were at Palm Point on Friday morning as well, but there was little evidence that Andrea had ever existed. We saw one distant Least Tern, which probably would have been there storm or not, since they often visit Newnans Lake in June. And we saw a mid-sized tern that was probably a Forster’s, though we couldn’t positively identify it. That was all. Otherwise the same Laughing Gulls and American White Pelicans that have been there since June 1st.

I spent Saturday in Georgia on family matters, so I missed Jonathan Mays’s notification that he’d found a Caspian Tern at Newnans Lake in the morning. I don’t think it’s been seen since then.

Jonathan also found a Gray Catbird on the 7th, in the remote area of Paynes Prairie where he’s working. Anyone else seeing catbirds in the county? That’s a tough one to get in summer. They’ve nested here on a few occasions, but they don’t normally breed in Alachua County.

A Yellow-breasted Chat has been seen twice along Sparrow Alley, on the 2nd by Adam Zions and on the 9th by Jonathan Mays.

Ignacio Rodriguez and Francisco Jimenez saw 2 Whooping Cranes and 2 lingering Blue-winged Teal from the La Chua observation platform on the 9th.

Two Roseate Spoonbills were sighted on the 9th, one at Paynes Prairie by Jonathan Mays and one near Watermelon Pond by Samuel Ewing.

If you need American Kestrel for The June Challenge, they’ve been seen at Cellon Creek Boulevard and on County Road 232 just a quarter mile west of County Road 241.

Go ahead and add those exotics to your list: Graylag Geese at Red Lobster Pond, Graylag Geese and Black Swans at the Duck Pond. And don’t forget the parrot, a Blue-fronted Amazon, that has been visiting Scott Flamand’s feeder at 9312 NW 15th Place since January. Scott writes, “We would love to have people come by. It shows up virtually every day. However, it visits sporadically. When it shows up it is always on the tray feeder on the pole system in the front yard. It is usually not very shy. Nobody needs to email but I’m at flamans@gm.sbac.edu if they have any questions. I will let the neighbors know there may be people stopping by during June.”

The amusing title of Katherine Edison’s latest blog post belies its serious subject matter: http://earthteachme.blogspot.com/2013/06/thoughts-on-stepping-in-cat-poo-while.html

The June Challenge – Day 5 update

Posted on by Rex Rowan

From: Rex Rowan <rexrowan@gmail.com>
To: Alachua County birding report

This morning Anne Kendall found a Ring-billed Gull and five Laughing Gulls on the dock at Powers Park, putting the icing on a successful birding trip. She started at Longleaf Flatwoods Reserve at 6 a.m., finding a Common Nighthawk and then spotting a Chuck-will’s-widow, always a tough bird to see. She then went on to the River Styx bridge on County Road 346, where she found a Prothonotary Warbler and a Black-crowned Night-Heron. Her next stop was the Windsor boat ramp, where she saw a Limpkin and a pair of Wood Ducks. And then on to Powers Park and the Ring-billed Gull. All of this in about two and a half hours. I think this is the county’s second June record for Ring-billed Gull. Anne sent me a few photos, and I’ve posted two.

Mike Manetz emailed this morning to ask if I wanted to go to Palm Point and find out whether Lloyd Davis’s Tree Swallow was still hanging around. I did, of course, and met him there at 7:15. No Tree Swallow, but the way you bird Palm Point is to stand there and wait for something to fly by, so that’s what we did. After about an hour we noticed a couple small whitish birds flying along the far shore, past the Windsor boat ramp. So we performed The Newnans Lake Shuffle, the little dance in which birders on the west side of the lake move to the east side, while the birds on the east side move to the west side. We never did get a decent look at them, but Mike saw them dive into the water, so they were terns, probably Forster’s Terns. We also saw a duck preening on the water which we couldn’t quite agree on, probably a Lesser Scaup. We didn’t see Anne’s Limpkin, but we did see a dozen or so Laughing Gulls, 15 American White Pelicans, three half-grown Wild Turkeys, a Least Bittern flying past the outlet of the boat channel, and an adult Bald Eagle.

Howard Adams and Barbara Mollison walked La Chua this morning. Many of the birds seen on Saturday are still around, including Roseate Spoonbills and Blue-winged Teal.

Also this morning, Barbara Shea went looking for June Challenge birds at San Felasco Hammock’s Millhopper Road entrance. Across the street from the parking lot she turned right and continued straight, and managed to find an Acadian Flycatcher. There was a Hooded Warbler in there too, but she couldn’t get it to show itself. She had a nice consolation prize, an Eastern Diamondback.

A couple people wrote to tell me that they’d checked the Red Lobster Pond on the 3rd but hadn’t found the Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks. So if you’re still looking for those, Debbie Segal has seen them at the Hague Dairy, and Anne Kendall at Powers Park.

This weekend Judy Bryan found a very late Cedar Waxwing, a single bird, at the south end of Lake Lochloosa.

Ron Robinson had an American Redstart visit his west Gainesville property on the 1st and 2nd.

We had a few cameras on our June 1st field trip. We twice saw a Fish Crow, identified by call, flying with an egg in its bill, pursued by Red-winged Blackbirds. I assumed it was making repeated depredations on the same Red-wing nest. But Miguel Palaviccini’s wonderful photo shows that the egg in the crow’s bill is round and unmarked, not like a Red-wing’s egg at all, as well as being too big for a Red-wing, and reveals that the crow had found the nest of a turtle. Further down the trail, in the canal leading up to the observation platform, a young King Rail hopped out of the weeds and remained in the open long enough for everyone to get a good look. John Martin got a nice video.

Looking at John’s YouTube collection, I find this footage of a singing Yellow-breasted Chat taken at La Chua in late April, and I’m reminded that, although we missed chats on the 1st, Adam Zions found one along Sparrow Alley on the morning of the 2nd. Barbara Mollison also saw one this morning.

The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology is putting out a massively comprehensive collection of North American bird sounds which they’re calling “The Master Set” and selling for $49.99. A selection of these, merely huge rather than ginormous, is called “The Essential Set” and it currently goes for $12.99. Read all about it: http://earbirding.com/blog/archives/4458

First two days of The June Challenge

Posted on by Rex Rowan

From: Rex Rowan <rexrowan@gmail.com>
To: Alachua County birding report

I showed up at Morningside Nature Center on Sunday morning to make sure everyone on the butterfly field trip signed the liability form and wouldn’t be able to sue us for butterfly bites, etc. Maralee Joos pulled in right behind me. She told me that she’d just come from Palm Point, where Lloyd Davis had found and photographed a very late Tree Swallow. As soon as everyone had signed the form I rushed to Palm Point in hopes of seeing it myself, but I was too late.

That’s probably the best bird found on The June Challenge so far. The best I’ve heard about, anyway.

Saturday’s field trip in search of June Challenge birds was very well attended – I think I counted 34 or 35 people – but the birds were not eager to be seen, so we spent a lot more time searching for them, and a lot less time actually enjoying them, than I’d expected. We did eventually find most of what we were hoping for, though. At Longleaf Flatwoods Reserve we got a quick glimpse of three Common Nighthawks and (after quite a bit of walking) got to ogle a very cooperative Bachman’s Sparrow. At Owens-Illinois Park in Windsor we saw four distant Laughing Gulls and one adult Bald Eagle, plus a bonus, two or three Limpkins drawn to the area by an abundance of exotic apple snails. Because we’d spent so much time in the first two locations, Powers Park and Palm Point were struck from the itinerary and we went directly to La Chua. There we had mixed luck: just about everyone saw the Whooping Cranes, Roseate Spoonbills, Great White Heron (non-countable), Least Bitterns, Purple Gallinules, Indigo Buntings, Blue Grosbeaks, and lingering Blue-winged Teal and American Coots, but only some of us saw the Yellow-billed Cuckoos, Northern Bobwhite, Common Ground-Dove, and Orchard Oriole, and we never found the Yellow-breasted Chat at all. I think most of us ended the field trip with 50-55 species on our lists.

You can read Katherine Edison’s account of the morning, with photos, here.

On Saturday afternoon I drove out to Cellon Creek Boulevard, which has always been a good place to find, in a single spot, several birds that can be hard to see in summer. I discovered that a new fence had been put up near the generating station, barring access to the brushy edges at the top of the hill. Still, I saw most of what I’d come for: American Kestrel, Eastern Kingbird, Killdeer, Red-headed Woodpecker, Eastern Bluebird, Brown Thrasher, Eurasian Collared-Dove, Purple Martin, Eastern Meadowlark, and Loggerhead Shrike. Northern Bobwhites called but never showed themselves, Mississippi and Swallow-tailed Kites sailed over the treeline on the far side of the pasture, and, rather surprisingly, a flock of 17 Laughing Gulls flew past.

In past years I expected to find Northern Rough-winged Swallows and Common Ground-Doves there as well, but neither showed up this year. A couple of people told me later that I could see Rough-wingeds at the Hague Dairy, and on eBird I noticed that John Martin got 14 of them there on Sunday, probably two or three family groups. If the young have already fledged, they’ll be leaving soon, so get out there and add them to your June Challenge list while you can.

Carol Huang emailed earlier today to tell me that she’d found a Northern Flicker and Red-headed Woodpeckers at Northeast Park on NE 16th Avenue a little east of Main Street. Flickers are rare summer residents in Alachua County, and Northeast Park and Morningside Nature Center are about the only places where they can reliably be found.

And you can see Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks at the Red Lobster Pond. Only two remained on Sunday morning.

Finally, a little business. Gmail seems to have a limit of 500 addresses to which it will send any given email, and we’re getting close. I know that a fair proportion of the 497 addresses on this mailing list go to UF students who have moved on, people who have lost interest, and others who just expected something different when they signed up. So if you’d like to continue to receive the Alachua County birding reports, please send an email to let me know that – something simple, like “Keep me on the list” or “You are the wind beneath my wings.” I’ll delete the addresses of those who don’t respond, and that should reduce the mailing list to a Gmail-friendly 300-400 addresses. Okay? Okay! I’ll repeat this request twice more, for those who miss it the first and second times.

Late spring update

Posted on by Rex Rowan

From: Rex Rowan <rexrowan@gmail.com>
To: Alachua County birding report

At 7:00 on Tuesday evening, May 14th, Adam and Gina Kent will share photographs and descriptions of their recent trip to Cuba where they saw a wide variety of endemics and migrants and met with conservation professionals who manage some of the world’s richest environments. Please join us at the Millhopper Library, 3145 NW 43rd Street.

Two of the links in the last birding report went bad between the time I wrote it and the time you received it. The correct link for the film “Birders: The Central Park Effect” playing at The Hipp on the 21st is http://thehipp.org/birder.html

  And the correct link for the story on the eBird team’s North American Record Big Day, complete with map and photos, is http://ebird.org/content/ebird/?p=654

Conrad Burkholder took a really lovely photo of the area around Alachua Sink during the Alachua Audubon field trip on Saturday the 11th. The field trip found a Great White Heron, two Whooping Cranes, three Roseate Spoonbills, two Purple Gallinules, three Yellow-breasted Chats, eight Blue Grosbeaks, a dozen Indigo Buntings, two Orchard Orioles, and 100 Bobolinks, among other things.

On the 10th Jonathan Mays saw the spring’s only White-rumped Sandpipers so far: “White-rumped Sandpipers are in – had a flock of 8 peeps buzz by me this morning at the La Chua observation platform. Some were giving the little mouse squeak flight calls of White-rumps but I was only able to confirm actual white rumps on three of the birds.”

Dale Henderson notified me on the 7th that a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher was hanging around the Cedar Key airfield. It was still there on the 11th. That’s pretty late for a Scissor-tailed, but last year I saw one there in June.

There are still a few Cedar Waxwings hanging around. I saw four at the Main Street Publix on the 12th and heard (but didn’t see) a few in my NE Gainesville neighborhood on the 13th.

Not really meaning to rub your noses in it, but in case you’re interested here are two photos of birders looking at last weekend’s Kirtland’s Warbler.

Jonathan Mays got a photo of a Canebrake Rattlesnake (formerly a distinct subspecies, now simply considered a Timber Rattlesnake) in northern Alachua County on the 5th.

The Tenth Annual June Challenge begins in about two weeks.

Remember Adam and Gina Kent’s presentation on birding in Cuba at 7:00 on Tuesday evening!

No news is bad news

Posted on by Rex Rowan

From: Rex Rowan <rexrowan@gmail.com>
To: Alachua County birding report

The Kirtland’s Warbler seems to have been a one-day wonder. Gary Davis wrote, “I was at San Felasco from 7:30 to 3:00 birding with Lloyd Davis, John Murphy, Bob Wallace, and others. I did not see the bird and as far as I know nobody else saw it during that time. Birding was slow all day, with no notable sightings.” Stuart Muller was philosophical: “If I could fly, I’d be back up in the air in this weather too. Lovely moment though.”

Mike Manetz walked out La Chua today. He found a Least Bittern in the canal – just where they were last year – and saw three Roseate Spoonbills at the observation platform, though they flew off as he watched. Jonathan Mays, on a different part of the Prairie, saw a spoonbill too – perhaps one of the same three – and got a photo.

Jonathan also got this photo of a singing male Prothonotary Warbler at Palm Point on the 2nd, which I’m linking here just because the color is so glorious, and to remind you that they’re resident all summer just a few miles east of Gainesville, so you should go marvel at them.

The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology is sponsoring a Young Birders’ Network. Here’s the YBN page on eBird and here’s the Facebook page.

Speaking of eBird, a team composed of eBird project leaders just set a new North American Big Day record of 294 species, besting the old record by an astounding 30 species. The story is here. Matt Hafner, Alachua County Birder Emeritus (even though he actually lived in Marion County), gets a mention. Matt may be the best birder I’ve ever met, and I’ve met John Hintermister and Mike Manetz, so that’s saying something.

Wild Birds Unlimited is sponsoring a showing of “Birders: The Central Park Effect” at The Hipp on May 21st. For details and a link to the trailer, go here.

Florida’s 2013 legislative session is over. For environmental highlights, go here, but I can tell you that the feral cat bill died a richly-deserved death in committee.

Sumer is icumen in. I heard my first cicadas of the season tuning up in the back yard this afternoon.

And speaking of poetry, one of our local birders, Adrienne Daniel, was inspired by her backyard birds:

DELIGHTFUL FRIENDS!

You are enjoyment, you are a smile,
You invite me to stay a while.
There is an order in what you do
And that can be said by very few.
You are thankful for what you receive
Or so your actions make me believe.
The seasons dictate your fashion style
And some of you travel many a mile.
I don’t know just how you know
Unless you search high and low.
Maybe it is the pull of generations past
But I sure hope this will last and last.
I am so lucky you found my home
And some of you never roam
But those of you who can’t stay for long
Always favor me with a glorious song.
The notes linger in my mind for days
And you delight in so many ways.
You all are my sunshine every day
From my first coffee to the suns last ray
To all my feathered friends I drink a toast
And hope I have been a proper host.

Christmas Count highlights

Posted on by Rex Rowan

I’m not sure, but I think the 161 or 162 species seen on today’s CBC is a record for the Count. Highlights in brief:

BLACK SCOTER: First county record. Six on Lake Wauberg. Be there first thing Monday morning!

Groove-billed Ani: One along the fenceline trail that cuts back toward the powerlines after you’ve walked through the barn at the beginning of the La Chua Trail. The bird was where the powerline cut intersects the fenceline trail.

Sprague’s Pipit: Two on Kanapaha Prairie, exactly where they were on the last CBC.

Ash-throated Flycatcher: TEN on Paynes Prairie, scattered among four territories. (TEN!)

Least Flycatcher: Four on Paynes Prairie.

Red-breasted Nuthatch: One in Micanopy, three in one tree (!) near the Kanapaha Prairie.

Canvasback: Five on Newnans Lake.

The rest in taxonomic order: Red-breasted Merganser 4, Yellow-crowned Night-Heron 1, Roseate Spoonbill 1, Limpkin 5, Spotted Sandpiper 1, Laughing Gull 1, Winter Wren 1, Northern Parula 1, Wilson’s Warbler 1, Yellow-breasted Chat 2, Le Conte’s Sparrow 6, Lincoln’s Sparrow 6, Summer Tanager 4, Indigo Bunting 2, Painted Bunting 1.