The Last of Carolina: A Mélange at Goose Creek SP

Carolina is a great state for birding. It's not California or Texas, nor even Arizona in terms of diversity, but its mountains and its plains and its coast still offer some of the best birding opportunities in the lower 48, especially considering how pretty the surrounding country is (Texas and Arizona cannot always make similar claims). What makes my time birding there even more exciting is that many of the areas where I visit are relatively unestablished on eBird, and as such I can play out my Lewis & Clark naturalist explorer fantasies (the PG-13 ones) with great fulfillment. 

Goose Creek SP is the largest hotspot in my area with about 170 species recorded in total, including a very impressive Shiny Cowbird from 2006. However, in the last 10 years in June, this site had nearer a dozen species recorded. A big site like this? In June? It's a sure thing. There will be many species of bird there, and I can still pretend to be a helpful contributor to citizen science (by confirming what people already would have predicted). For example, nor June records of Common Yellowthroat in the last 10 year? Not any more!!

No June records of two squirrels sitting on a stump in June in the last 10 years? Oh. Well here are some more anyway. Anyhow you get the idea. It's rewarding to explore a place with that burgeoning sense of discovery again, not knowing what all one might find, but knowing one will find a lot, and not just of ticks crawling up the thighs. 

The GC SP is predominantly a deciduous/hard woodland preserve off of the Pamlico River mouth, but this means there's coastal marsh and brackish swamp habitat winding through the preserve. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Prothonotary Warbler is the correct thought, the loud-singing face-melting I-don't-care-how-close-you-are-on-the-boardwalk Warbler. Icepacks and wardrobe changes were in order. 

PRWAs are superlative and typically accommodating, but their accompanying mosquito clouds really make a fellow feel unwelcome. Even taking into consideration the crevace-invading ticks one picks up in the grass, the woodland areas are more comfortable and not without certain quaint, atavistic amenities. 

The telephone is located adjacent to a designated graveyard for people that died from yellow fever in the early 1800s--make of that what you will.
The wooded areas, as one would expect, were teeming with Cardinals, Jays, and Robins, as well as Vireo species, Flycatchers, and Gnatcatchers. Downy Woodpeckers were both present and small, commensurate to expectation, as were Red-headed Woodpeckers correspondingly present and retiring.

It's still foreign, even a bit awkward, to stand on sandy coast and look up into pine trees, but that is much the experience in Carolina on down through Florida. Pines don't naturally grow below 3500 feet or so in Arizona, but I guess it's only appropriate that where they grow at sea level out east, they also bring bird species whose western counterparts are found in similarly higher elevation. 

Yellow-throated Warbler is the sexier, longer-billed, longer-winded counterpart to our pine-loving Grace's Warblers out west. Like Grace's Warblers and unscrupulous junkies, they simply go where the needles are, and out east that doesn't require the same elevation.

YTWA was one of my main targets for the area, knowing that it would be suitable habitat, this would be only the second time I saw the species, and I had no pictures from the first encounter. The 3 different individuals I logged this time were good sports about it, with one of them even singing/buzzing on territory in a mucho gorgeous way.

There were lots of Acadian Flycatchers around, as well as Eastern Wood-Pewees. Neither posed well nor had much good to say, so I shall return the favor.

Poking around the understory did turn up a few other good ones, including some goofy Ovenbirds. These birds were not quite skulk-meisters of the KEWA or SWWA variety, but they were still pretty withdrawn, and sometimes creepy. 

The Goose Creek SP opens up onto the Pamlico River with a small designated swim area, but enough shoreline to walk along the brackish tidal flats a good ways east and west. The offshore waters are littered with crab pods, and the near-shore tree skeletons are littered with Osprey nests, many of which are impressive in size. 

With their reeking cattail marshes, the tidal flats are also good for Rail species, although I arrived too late in the day for much luck beyond truncated audio. Indigo Buntings were good sports, continuing their excellent recent PR campaign with B's Bs. Great-crested Flycatchers continued their suspicious cold-shouldering, so to each their own.

Many of the pine and oak trees in Carolina are littered with Spanish moss, the zany moss that just won't quit. According to the wikipedia machine, Spanish moss--also known as the 'jellyfish plant' and 'Old-Man Winter's pit hair'--is neither lichen nor moss, but a species of bromeliad plant that populates both with tiny, inconspicuous flowers and by colonizing other trees when fragments of its chains drift onto other hosts. Other fun fact: it's often used by Brown-headed Nuthatches as drapery. 

There are a couple of bothersome things about my time birding in Carolina these last couple years. One is that I have still not seen Scarlet Tanager nor American Redstart (both birds that I first logged, inappropriately, in Arizona) and I am bereft of Orioles. A nifty Orchard Oriole helped assuage my disillusionment about these failings a bit, where are those Baltimores at?
I probably need to branch out with more habitats and hotspots, but it's hard to walk away from the diversity of a place like Goose Creek SP. Sometimes birding requires sacrifice. Sometimes it requires hard work. There are dark times ahead.

Grab a Corkscrew and Drink It Up!

Florida is a super birdy place, like unfairly birdy. It's the only state with records of all the North American herons and egrets, it gets plenty of the east coast warbler migrations, it has its own endemics, plenty of cool raptors, vireos, solid sparrows, terrific terns, and Masked Duck. 

Located on the southern half of the gulf coast, the Naples area isn't the birdiest in Florida, but it still has some hot spots, and one of the most well known is the Corkscrew Swamp Audubon Sanctuary. 

This lovely preserve hosts several different habitats, including cedar forests--a diminishing habitat--that host breeding pairs of Wood Stork earlier in the winter. The cedar woods grow adjacent to pine woods, something that, as an Arizonan, it's weird to see when not above 5,000 feet elevation, and of course there's plenty of marshy mush all around.

The pristine foliage at this preserve was remarkable, but that didn't make it easy birding. When I arrived around 7am, the woods were echoing with calls, but many of them were unsurprisingly foreign. High canopies, adverse lighting, and continual cloud cover exacerbated the difficulties of looking for little birds in big woods, though I must admit that birding in the shade was a nice change.

The most dominant sound of all, by far, was that of the Carolina Wren. With so many of the other birds staying high in the canopies, they were also, somewhat oddly, the most visible birds and were consequently the most numerous species I counted during my time at Corkscrew. Photographing the flighty buggers was tricky in the shade, but their numbers meant the odds were in my favor and eventually one perched in a sunnier spots, and did so very nicely.

That particular Carolina Wren just happened to fly in and land only a few feet away from me. It was a welcome relief to my eyes, which were otherwise being tasked to discern the small birds in this mess. I know I must be sounding pretty meek here, but birding in the thick forest really is a different skill, and one with which I have precious little practice.

Audio birding was terrific for getting ticks, but coming to a new place is only satisfying with some solid sightings too. In the hopes of seeing Barred Owl, I was constantly scanning the mossy overhangs above me, never turning up the Owls but seeing several of the handsome and Arizona-uncommon Red-shouldered Hawks. The tales that people bring back from birding in Costa Rica or Peru are marvelous, and maybe the absurdly high amounts of absurdly colorful birds there breaks through the jungle, but honestly my confidence in birding those sorts of places is shot after struggling in the Corkscrew cedar.

The twisting boardwalk teemed with other life, as many insects (non-biting for the most part), reptiles, and amphibians all made their presence known. Scurrying anole lizards and clinging tree frogs were lovely decoration during the trip, and some larger aquatic lizards attentively loomed in the duckweed off the boardwalk. How many wee gators do you see?

While taking a break in the gatorhood, I was able to snap off the only Warbler shot I came away with during the trip (crushing disappointment!). Of course, it had to be a Warbler I've seen and photographed in Arizona already. There isn't any avoiding it; I'll just have to go to Ohio some May and do the warblering right.

One section of the Corkscrew boardwalk leads out of the dense cedar marsh and into the thinner Florida pines. Of course, this different habitat supported different birds, and here I was able to pick up some lifers with relative ease. A calling Great-crested Flycatcher was a great start. 

Chittering Pine Warblers and Brown-headed Nuthatches were great continuations, particularly because the brown-helmet pygmy completed my North American Nuthatch section.

The Red-shouldered Hawks were second only to Osprey as the most common raptor in the Naples area, and at Corkscrew Swamp they were the most numerous. Seeing some fly-over Swallow-tailed Kites was a one-off treat, but being up close to the Red-shouldereds was really enjoying the home-feild advantage that birding in Florida brings.
--Home Field Advantage: noun; seeing a bird in it's preferred/best/most usual habitat, such that one gets more and better views (and photos) than one gets seeing the same species of bird as a vagrant in other areas. Example: "Traveling to Florida gives the Arizonan a great Home Field Advantage for Red-shouldered Hawks and Northern Parula, which turn up in Arizona but are often skittish and a total pain to pursue.  

A full day's agenda necessitated a relatively short visit to Corkscrew, but on the way out there were plenty of birds to see and shoot in the parking lots spaces, where the thick palm and elm groves gave way to green lawns. Here the Black Vultures did Vulture things.

And Common Grackles did Grackle things. I know, it's in bad taste to include a Common Grackle in a bird post, but it was a lifer for me okay so, like, leave it alone!

Do you recognize these primaries?



A young Loggerhead Shrike was the last bit of icing on the swamp cake.

Coincidentally enough, there were a few Woodstorks feeding in one of the many road-side drainage canals while driving to Corkscrew Swamp, but it was too late in the year to expect any in their roosts. Despite the sore neck and lack of Storks, it was a solid tally for Corkscrew Swamp (unsurprisingly) and a great lesson in practice and adaptation for an outsider like myself.