From: Rex Rowan <rexrowan@gmail.com>
To: Alachua County birding report
Mike Manetz walked Sparrow Alley this morning after Jennifer Donsky told him that she’d found an Alder Flycatcher there. Mike relocated Jennifer’s bird and saw a second one as well. The first was south of the trail near the watery dip beyond the powerlines, and the second was in a small grove of persimmons just a couple hundred feet in from the trail’s beginning, where an Alder lingered for nearly a month at this time last year. Both were identified by their “pip!” call notes. If last weekend’s Barr Hammock bird was also an Alder, that makes three in the county at once. It’s bizarre: we never had an Alder Flycatcher here until 2010, and now they’re so abundant that the county will soon commence spraying empidonacide to control them….(No, not really.) Mike also saw two Blue-winged Warblers on his walk, and even more surprising than the Alders, a Lawrence’s Warbler, a hybrid of Blue-winged and Golden-winged Warbler that has been recorded in Alachua County only three times before, most recently in 1990. Here’s what a Lawrence’s looks like: https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7419/9124553719_b120308131_z.jpg
Debbie Segal made arrangements with GRU to offer a special Sheet Flow Restoration Project field trip for Alachua Audubon volunteers on the 30th. It was a very productive morning, and the group saw some nice things: a flock of four Roseate Spoonbills, a Great White Heron wandering from the Florida Keys, a mixed flock of Barn and Bank Swallows swarming over one of the cells, and eleven species of shorebirds, including some uncommon species – Pectoral and Stilt Sandpipers and Semipalmated Plover – and some that are locally quite rare – Western Sandpiper and Short-billed Dowitcher. Hopefully the Sheet Flow Restoration Project will continue to attract birds once the vegetation has stabilized in all three cells.
One hundred years ago tomorrow, September 1, 1914, the last Passenger Pigeon in the world, a 29-year-old female named Martha, tumbled from her perch in the Cincinnati Zoo, and the most abundant bird in the history of Planet Earth went extinct. John Fitzpatrick of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has written about the event, and what it means to us today, in a New York Times editorial. But the closest we’ll ever come to seeing a live Passenger Pigeon is reading John James Audubon’s 1831 description of a flock settling in to feed: “As soon as the Pigeons discover a sufficiency of food to entice them to alight, they fly round in circles, reviewing the country below. During their evolutions, on such occasions, the dense mass which they form exhibits a beautiful appearance, as it changes its direction, now displaying a glistening sheet of azure, when the backs of the birds come simultaneously into view, and anon, suddenly presenting a mass of rich deep purple. Then they pass lower, over the woods, and for a moment are lost among the foliage, but again emerge, and are seen gliding aloft. They now alight, but the next moment, as if suddenly alarmed, they take to wing, producing by the flappings of their wings a noise like the roar of distant thunder, and sweep through the forests to see if danger is near. Hunger, however, soon brings them to the ground. When alighted, they are seen industriously throwing up the withered leaves in quest of the fallen mast. The rear ranks are continually rising, passing over the main-body, and alighting in front, in such rapid succession, that the whole flock seems still on wing.”