Darling Birds

One of my (missed) target birds on our Florida trip was the elusive Mangrove Cuckoo, which is found in its namesake mangrove forests along the Florida coast. The J.N. Darling Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island showed some of the most recent MACU reports, and I was eager to visit the remarkable mangrove swamps, a habitat we don't have on the west side of the country. 

The drive onto Sanibel island was lit with a beautiful sunrise. Frigatebirds and Pelicans soared over the connecting bridges, while Laughing Gulls scavenged near the road.

Ospreys were incredibly numerous in the area, and were in fact the most numerous bird I saw on Sanibel, after Laughing Gull and Sanderling. It was yet another bird that occurs often in Arizona, but seldom with such up-close visibility.

The J.N. Darling Refuge is a loop trail several miles long. It can be accessed by vehicle for $5 or on foot. Since the toll-bridge cleaned out my cash I had to hoof it. Although there was plenty of noise around the refuge, many of the birds were unsurprisingly difficult to see. Winding moats of gulf water encircle all of the walkways and the dense mangrove vegetation concealed the birds. 

This Red-bellied Woodpecker perched atop a street light near the visitor center, and was one of the few non-water birds I'd get a good look at during the walk.

The Mangrove Cuckoos were always a bit of a long shot, but I was pretty confident, and with good reason, that the Darling Refuge would turn up one of my old friends from Texas. 

This was the first of several lovely Yellow-crowned Night Herons, just hangin' out doing heron stuff.

While going to school in Dallas, my disgusting dank dingy apartment complex had a gunked-up fish pond near the front office, you know, to help with curb appeal. The apartments were terrible, but the fish pond drew in several YCNHs in the evening.

I'd sit out and watch the Night Herons hunting around the water's edge, watching them snap up minnows, little frogs, and even crawfish.
At one point while I was sitting out near the water, I observed one YCNH pull out a particularly massive crawfish, far too big and pinchy for it to swallow. It ditched the crustacean right near my bench, and since not everybody can say they've had fresh-caught seafood that was caught for them by a night heron, we boiled that invasive crawfish up and et' him with garlic butter.

A few Little Blue Herons, Ibis, and Cormorants added to the day's list, but it was hard to get visual on smaller birds. The one exception to this, of course, was the merry Cardinal. They were all over the refuge, constantly making me chase after their scurrying silhouettes only to finally focus and then feel disappointment. There's nothing wrong with Cardinals of course, but they ain't Cuckoos.

While these red birds sent me on red herrings, I also came across various other inhabitants of the island, including adorable little mangrove crabs, anole lizards, and this Black Racer.
I didn't know if it was poisonous, so I went ahead and had it bite me just to be sure.



The tour was very enjoyable just for the habitat, and I was pleased to get some Night-heron photos as well. The Cuckoos didn't materialize but a lifer even came out of the mix in the form of this bug-eyed Mottled Duck. Score!

Tri-colored Ditch-Diver

Some of the best birding I did in Florida, or maybe rather some of the most productive, was along the many innocuous canals and watercourses that seemed to form as intertwined a network as the roads themselves. There is so much water, running in channels through neighborhoods, along streets and highways, through developments projects, and around any designated birding destinations, it's impossible to avoid. 

We have canals in Arizona of course, and they support a fair amount of bird life as well, but these winding water features don't have near the visibility or lushness of the Florida canals, and within these ubiquitous road-side canals I saw my first Wood Storks and Roseate Spoonbills of the trip. They also produced many White Ibis, Egrets, and Anhingas. 

There often wasn't enough room or time to pull over and photograph the feathery roadside attractions, as the canals take the place of shoulders on many of the roads where I was driving, but at one canal behind a Holiday Inn (yes, have no shame as a birder, especially in a new and distant land!) I found a Tri-colored Heron terrorizing near the tules.



This was another stunning bird that, although seen in Arizona briefly, definitely benefitted the birder with its home-feild advantage in Florida. They were more common, more visible, and more comfortable around people. As such, I got to sit and watch this elegant eater hunt along its canal with only the occasional honking-car disturbing the ambiance.

It was always just a bit too fast for me.

As in any state, especially one with many good birding attractions, skulking along the canals hardly feels like proper, dignified birding. And yet, it's also an irremovable part of the backyard birding scene in Florida and similar states, just as much as feeder-watching or taking note of what's around the neighborhood. These Venetian waterways are a part of all the communities in the area, and the birds are as well. 

It also provided the nice security of knowing that even if I dipped on some of the target species at my designated birding sites (which I did, a lot), I'd still see some cool stuff on the way there, or back.

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.

Burned But Never Burnt Out

Ah, the joys and pains of the beach...

Perhaps for an Arizonan or desert dweller, it holds a special allure. We experience the heat and the sun, unrelenting and beating in their power, but do not enjoy the cool salty breezes or the undulating reprieve of the tides, nor for that matter do we get particularly good seafood. Despite the Florida beaches fulfilling everything one needs is a nice beach, except maybe for seclusion, I was horribly cut on the double-edged sword that is beaching and beach birding.

Despite the plethora of great birding that beaches provide, they also have an enervating effect. After a few hours of chasing peeps along the shoreline and making all manner of muscular poses, the soporific effect of sun and sea cannot be denied. But on the beach too much of this:

Leaves one with this (serious erythema solera):

Which prompts days of this:

Followed by a humiliating week of this: (his feathers are molting/peeling off)

Such was the case on the second day into our Florida trip, when I sustained massive sunburn of the torso from a combination of photographing Sanderlings, Gulls, and White Ibis, and then injudiciously mooching off a reclining beach chair form the nearby Ritz Carlton resort and falling asleep without any protection.
Oh, the crippling pain, and then oh, the crippling peeling. Everywhere I walked afterwards, my skin left behind a lovely trail of snowy dermis. Anyway, the sunburn faded, but the bird sightings and photos remain, so it was a long term victory.

Despite their very variable stages of molt, Sanderlings are one of the most recognizable and beloved sights of a proper beach, even by non-birders. Their anxious antics provide endless angst and amusement to passersby. While all of the other creatures come to the beach and indulge in the water, Sanderlings will never fully commit.
Surely, no bird feels as though it walks the narrow line between life and death as the Sanderling.

Though many of the Sanderlings had left for their high tundra breeding grounds, We still saw dozens at all of the different beaches we visited in early May. I suspect many of these birds won't even bother to make the trip this year. It's just...so much work, and after all you're supposed to go to Florida to retire.

What do you think? Does this look like a bird that's about to leave of a 6,000 mile migration? Nah, they'll just nap it out. Breeding can wait.

One of the top Florida Goal Birds was the White Ibis. It sounds like a superhero or something, and they are a pretty spectacular bird even without any super powers. A curious creature, it's a pretty big deal when they turn up outside of the Gulf coast/Florida area, but within that locale they turn up in parking lots, golf courses, backyard irrigation ditches, and any marshy areas in between. They really live up to the designation of 'locally' common.'

As such, they're not always in the most photogenic places, but they can be found on the beaches as well, inspiring the Sanderlings with their stalwart immersion in the ravenous tide.

Although I saw several dozen White Ibis around the Naples area, none were so accommodating as this bird. We spent significant time together, during which it foraged quite contentedly and I received a strong blasting of ultraviolet light. When we began the shoot, my complexion matched the White Ibis's alabaster body, but by the end I more closely matched to hue of its face and legs.

It was a very meticulous forager, wielding that large beak with great precision, even as waves broke all around it, showing the Sanderlings how it's done:

Salty spray, it's invigorating!

Did you know that White Ibises have a matching white eyelid? I did not.

To be fair, the White Ibis wasn't the only bird bravely foraging within the water's break line.
With the sand being so fine, the few Ruddy Turnstones had a hard time finding ruddy stones to turn, but they gulped down the many tiny bivalves that were exposed with every wave.

Before my wife and I headed out to the Pelican Beach area, I spent several hours at the famous Corkscrew Swamp observatory. Look forward to that post later this week.

Happy Memorial Weekend.

Royalty Gets a Tern

We get more Terns in Arizona than one might expect, or at least when I was first starting to pay attention to birds, I was surprised by the number of different species. In the spring and early summer months, Caspian and Forster's Terns are a fairly common site at some of the larger Maricopa County water features. Least Terns are annual as well, though uncommon, and have even established a few breeding pairs in Phoenix in the last couple of years.
So, with my wife and I visiting the Tern-rich Florida Gulf Coast in May, I wasn't dumbstruck at the prospect of seeing many of these elegant birds, but I was still looking forward to terning over a new leaf. Brown Pelicans turn up in Phoenix as well and don't have quite the same aerial ethos as the Terns, but there's no more quintessential sight at the beach than the Pelican patrol.

As expected, I saw Caspian, Common, and Least Terns flying off-shore along the gulf beaches. I was bummed to miss Sandwich Terns while in the area, but very pleased to find some nice Royal Tern repositories, even if the specimens were all suffering from May-pattern baldness.

Fairly large, fairly rude, and rarely found away from the oceanic coasts--no records in Arizona in the last ten years--these Terns live up to their names, even when they're not in breeding plumage.

Their aerial acrobatics were predictably (though not boringly) impressive, but the best place to study and photograph these birds was near the 5th street peer in Naples. With the constant presence of fisherman on the peer, these birds had lost their fear of man, or at least would swallow their anxiety if it also included the possibility of swallowing discarded fish pieces.

It was pretty cloudy in the evening when I visited the peer, so I didn't come away with nifty Tern flight shots. This photo of a bug-eyed beauty is plenty nice though, even regal.
One can sense the haughtiness in this bird's demeanor. "Bow to me, and bring gifts of fish!"
Royalty...