2013: Week 17-Last week in the Sunshine State

April 21^st  – 27^th

       Well, it’s the final week of April 2013 and we wonder “Where have these first four months of the year gone?”  It seems as if we just arrived and headed down to the Space Coast Birding Festival….but that was 3 months ago!  It’s been a great year with such rare highlights as the Vermillion flycatcher, White-cheeked pintail, Thick-billed vireo, Cassin’s kingbird, Spot-breasted oriole, Gray kingbird, Western kingbird, Long-billed curlew, and the Ash-throated flycatcher. We added six new life-birds while here in Florida and visited several new preserves we had never birded before.  So….in summary, it’s been a wonderful productive 3 ½ months.  But we still had one week left, and so we took a last run down to Merritt Island to see if we could pad the numbers.

       At Merritt, we ended up with just under 40 species on a chilly, windy and drizzly day.  The numbers are down as many of those species so common in the earlier part of the year have done what we are about to do….head north.  We did not come across a single species of duck!  Waterfowl are so abundant down here in January that you cannot look upon the waters of a single impoundment without spending an hour combing through the throngs to pick out each and every new species.  Coots numbering in the thousands during January and February were non-existent today.

       There are numbers of certain species which are increasing as we enter into spring, however.  Spoonbills seem to be more numerous than previous months.

     

       The number of tri-colored herons was very high today.  It seemed that every open body of water was home to several of the species.  Many are sporting their newly acquired white plumes, typical of the breeding season. 

       The Eastern kingbird, absent for the past three months, is happily once again on territory, a summer resident across most of the United States.  As the spring and summer wear on, these birds will become more and more common.

       One other quite common species was also found in some abundance at Merritt this week.  Unfortunately, it was the feral hogs that were out digging through the soil cover in search of grubs and roots.  These mammals have become a major pest in the southeast, doing considerable damage to forest, meadow and roadside habitat.  When they move through an area, they leave behind plots of land that literally look as though a backhoe had been used to excavate the land.  They are being hunted in an attempt to “cull the herd”, but they are prolific breeders and we now see them almost every time we visit Merritt Island.

       Later in the week, we drove north to Washington Oaks Gardens State Park in Palm Coast.  With some strong north winds accompanying stormy weather for the past couple of days, we had hoped to find migrating songbirds taking cover here in the heavily wooded gardens.  Sadly, we did not find too much we did not already have.  We did locate Prairie, Black and White warblers, and our old buddy the Northern parula.  The parulas are prevalent in the early spring in Florida, truly one of the harbingers of the season.  I had one of my closest encounters with one at the gardens as the bird flew in within a couple of feet of me and landed in a shrub…checking me out as much as I was him. Normally, these little guys are difficult to see clearly as they prefer to forage in the canopy of the live oaks, often feeding and hiding in the Spanish moss which adorns the limbs of these massive trees.  At such close proximity, it was amazing to see exactly how tiny these warblers are.  Many of these little beauties will join Sharon and me as we head north next week, and we look forward to seeing or at least hearing them in the hardwood forests of the northeast.

       Later in mid-week, we had yet another chase as a Neotropic cormorant had been reported along Biolab Road back down in Merritt Island.  The directions were pretty explicit, so we hopped in the RAV and headed south.  We scouted out the first possible cite and came up with many Double-crested cormorants in various plumages.  Several of the breeding males had the tell-tale crests which in spite of their name are not seen very commonly.  Plenty of other species were around, but try as we may, we could not “morph” any of the DC’s into the desired Neotropic.  But we persisted, and as luck would have it, we eventually spotted a noticeably thinner and smaller cormorant perched on a piling right where the rare bird alert posting had noted.  Out came the scope and sure enough, we got the visual confirmation we wanted…..our first Neotropic cormorant in several years and the first we ever had in Florida.  This sighting was doubly sweet as we had chased the bird earlier this year  down to Wakodahatchee Wetlands in DelRay Beach and came up short. 

Dark morph Short-tailed hawk

        Finally, on Friday night we decided to go for one more rarity.  A member of the Halifax Audubon, Steve, had reported sightings of multiple Swallowtail kites and the very elusive Short-tailed hawk at Central Park in Ormond Beach (naturally when I plugged the park into the POI’s of the GPS, it wanted to send me back to NYC!)  We found the park and we found Steve ready and willing to give us the guidance we needed to find the birds.  Early on, we had a quick sighting of what we believed to be the Short-tail.  Unfortunately, the view was brief and the one shot I could get was back-lit, but it sure looked like the quarry we were after! Later examination of the photo(s) by a local expert in the field (chief ornithologist for the Marine Science Center at Ponce Inlet) confirmed this sighting!

       The grand finale came when the Swallow-tailed kites Steve had promised finally arrived. And what a show they put on!  First one, then another, then several more all sailing gracefully as only kites can do right over our heads and out over the lake.  As the sun was setting, we had 14 kites visible at the same time, kettling, then peeling off only to rejoin shortly thereafter.  It was truly and avian air show being staged as if totally for our exclusive enjoyment.  What a way to wind down our three and a half months here in Florida!