Catch Up but No Fries

I confess! As anyone can see by the date on my last post, it's been over 2 months that I've been MIA...Nothing drastic has happened, I've just been extremely lazy about keeping up with my Blog. I have done very little birding outside of watching the backyard birds at the feeders, or the few varieties of birds seen at the beach, but what deliberate birding I have done ~ namely visiting two different birding spots on the Great Florida Birding Trail ~ has produced very disappointing results as far as visual and photographic issues goes...

Hubby and I just visited No. Peninsula State Park a few miles south of Flagler Beach...this is where the FL scrub jay can be found supposedly. We heard and saw many birds but not well enough to ID any, except for some black vultures and a blue jay.  ARG! Discouragement reigns supreme!

Ok I really shouldn't whine, we have quite the variety of birds coming and going at the back yard feeders, and neighboring trees...

The most common birds, the chipping sparrows, arrive daily...

Yellow-rumped warblers are about town...but are rare to our feeders...

We are suddenly seeing a No. mocking bird here and there...not at the feeders, but

this fellow came in for a vigorous bathing...

The tufted titmice grab a nut and zip away...

The American goldfinches have appeared recently, still pale...

The male pine warblers are very yellow now...

The blue jay couple continues to show up daily, usually separately...

When together, they don't seem to share well or tolerate one another...

Despite there being two separate platform feeders...

The same goes for the red-bellied woodpecker pair...this is the female...

Another No. mockingbird, this one in our blooming bottlebrush tree...

(I was very excited when it started blooming!)

We're seeing a few brown-headed nuthatches now...

In S Dakota I saw white and red-breasted nuthatches,

So was excited to see this little fellow to add to my lifer list...

The male red-bellied woodpecker up in our backyard maple tree...

The squirrels have STUFFED themselves with those pink seeds from the front maple tree...

Wiping out the entire tree's seed supply, except for what is

Scattered all over the driveway and front lawn...we saw up to 5 squirrels

At a time in the front maple...the back maple already has leaves...

Will the front yard maple grow leaves?!

A handsome male No. cardinal on a feeder arm covered in morning dew...

The new feeder pole has 2 criss-crossed arms and holds 8 feeders...

I'm going broke just using 5 of the hooks...

A chance visit from a yellow-bellied sapsucker, looking for a drink...

The robins rarely visit, but when they do it's a good-sized flock,

Descending upon the bird bath and ground feeding...

They're in and out for a short period just one day...

Then gone again for weeks...

This photo includes a female brown-headed cowbird...

The females are like the robins, wham, bam, gone...

Except for very recently...we're now seeing males & females,

all over the feeders, daily.

(Queue the theme from "Jaws" ...)

The bad boy of the bunch...a sharp-shinned hawk (I don't think it's a Cooper's hawk due to the small size)...he appears to have a mockingbird perhaps...these guys scout backyard feeders for prey...we have seen him swooping thru the yard a couple times since this deadly visit...

Even tho we didn't see any birds of interest today at No. Peninsula St. Park,

On the way back home, heading along Flagler Beach, we stopped so I

Could attempt to photograph the No. gannets...still too far away for decent shots...

Only to discover that a small pod of porpoises (our guess) was cruising by...

3-4 of them were actually surfing in the waves! Cowabunga!

G is for Gallinule, Gator, Girl, Gulls, Gimpie, Gannet

Ok, I'm a little pink-faced as I admit I forgot to post some stuff from December...so here I am back-tracking to early December, when our daughter was visiting and the three of us had headed down to the Ft. Lauderdale area. We stayed a couple days with my brother-in-law, whom we had lived with the first 6 months upon our arrival in Florida.

While there, the 3 of us and BIL's girlfriend Karen went to the Everglades Holiday Park, to take dtr. on an air boat ride.  We didn't realize we were walking onto the set of a reality show!  This is where "Gator Boys" is filmed.  No TV cameras that day...but we had an interesting, fun visit...despite the lack of any real time spent speeding fast in the boat....

During the air boat ride, we spotted some purple gallinules!  A lifer bird for me, very exciting as the gallinule is so colorful and not seen in very many states outside of Florida....this was my 2nd to last lifer sighted in 2012. Unfortunately I couldn't get any clear pics of one, ARG!

Er....we also spotted a couple alligators, which was expected...

Back on land, we checked out the Gator Boys' gator show, then I shelled out some cash so dtr. could hold a baby gator....awww, isn't it cute?

Not so cute that we minded snacking on one of its cousins...Karen bought us all a plate of gator bites, frog legs, and some unidentified fish, all breaded and deep fried...duh...

I'd already tried gator some time ago, but frog legs? If dtr. can do it, so can I....

they taste like mild fish...(not chicken!)

While snacking, we had a peacock hanging around, looking for hand-outs....don't bother rubbing your eyes, it IS a peacock!

In fact, we had a line at the table waiting for dropped crumbs...that's a boat-tailed grackle behind the peacock....

Mr. P went as far as posing pretty to try to encourage us to toss him some goodies...

*    *    *    *   *

Ok, back at home.....

Update: I had this labeled as an American Pipit and a lifer...my first reaction had been that it was a female red-winged blackbird, but the vivid white eyebrow threw me off because the female blackbirds I'd seen while living in S Dakota had less prominent, beige eyebrows.  Fellow bird nerd Laurence let me know (thank you!) he believes it's a blackbird...so I went back over my two field guides and, looking at the beak, I would have to concur this is the female red-winged blackbird....darn it.  LOL. Oh well, that just means that my last lifer sighting for 2012 is the blurry Northern gannet!

Back to 2013.....barely....

Rube and I hit the beach a few days ago, soon as the up and down weather hit an "up"....

We saw the usual shore birds, like this sanderling amid some frothy sea foam...

Ok everyone, pop quiz.....what IS this?!  Choices: Red Knot (winter plumage), which I believe it is; Western sandpiper, which appears to have black not greenish legs; or least sandpiper, tho I'm pretty sure it's not that due to the size and darker winter plumage. The other similar birds either don't come to Florida or don't have greenish legs in winter or...I'm labeling it a red knot.  A lifer!

I just don't get it...how can the juvenile ring-billed gull be larger than the adult?!  Can anyone explain this?!  Or is there another immature gull that looks like the imm. RBG? ARG!!

This sweet little ruddy turnstone was resting on the orange shell chips that were scattered on the beach...

But it wasn't alone...this one-legged sanderling was sticking close by. Aww, what are friends for?!

(And yes, I'm sure it was one-legged, I saw it hop.)

I shot this very distant flyer out over the ocean, thinking it may be a wintering white pelican...but it's a Northern gannet!! Another lifer!

So, there's a long boardwalk from the parking lot to the beach in this one spot...along the boardwalk there's a sign with info about the burrowing gopher tortoise that lives in the dunes there, which is clearly being protected from beachgoers.  There was an older couple reading the sign when we came back over the walk towards the parking...I mumbled to myself, yea right, you and I will never see one tho.....crossing the parking lot, we saw 3 kids huddled together looking at something....and there was this tortoise trudging along, hell-bent on reaching the safety of the dunes.  A turtle lifer!

Heading back south along A1A, we stopped in the Marineland area (a town with a dolphin rehab center)...to check out a holding pond, where some big groupers were swimming around...at the far end was this lone little blue heron....

Outnumbered by a flock of brown pelicans....

On the lawn nearby, killdeer were making their eerie call...

And to cap the outing, further down the road Rube pulled over when an osprey flew over the car and I exclaimed, "It's got a fish!"  Luckily, the osprey landed on a nearby pole, still flopping fish in its claw, and I was able to get some decent shots.


** My bird species count for 2012 is a measly 83, so I'm hoping to see at least 100 in 2013.

The Blurry Bird Blog Bit II

I'm still here, have just been "out of pocket" for awhile due to the major distraction of putting a house together, from paint to furniture to what-nots.  We're getting there, slowly but surely.  New kitchen counters look fab, bedroom furniture is finally ALL here, tho there are a couple small issues that we have to wait for someone to come out and look at...ARG. Anyway, I have finally ordered a belated Christmas gift for myself, it is back-ordered naturally, so probably won't see it for 3 more weeks...a new 4-hook, squirrel repelling, tall bird-feeding pole. Dang they're expensive! If you haven't checked out Duncraft's website, I recommend that you do if you feed the yard birds...

Speaking of, I have been taking more blurry shots from inside the house but have not gone out birding ~ other than snapping beach birds during the past couple of visits ~ in some time.  Our weather is up and down, today being down to 55 for a high. Yesterday it was 75. We've had frost a few mornings...one of the perks of living in central Florida.  Yes Virginia, it can frost in Florida!

Ok without further ado....the latest (mostly) blurred birdy bling around the homestead...

The chipping sparrow is an occasional visitor...

I believe this female red-bellied woodpecker and her mate are the only 2 RBW's visiting the feeders...I love how they use their tail to stabilize themselves...

What the...? A red-winged blackbird came through briefly...

The titmouses have been checking out the suet...they continue to be very flighty...

The Carolina chickadees are occasional visitors and also very flighty, which is weird considering how people-friendly (curious) the black-capped ones are...

The yellow-rumped warblers are occasional and fleeting...

This is Mo, Larry, or Curly...one of three squirrels that are almost always on the maple tree or under the bird feeder eating fallen seeds...due to crippled nature of the feeder, at least one of them knows how to get to the platform feeder despite the baffle....

Finally, robins! They came, they saw, they conquered....and now they don't visit anymore, but I do see them around the area.  This is the first I've seen any robins at all since arriving in Florida over a year ago, tho the Stokes field guide claims they're here year-round. What's up with that?!

The Carolina wren (me-thinks the same one) still visits occasionally, and seems to be getting a little less timid....

Two female brown-headed cowbirds and a male No. cardinal...I wasn't sure what the dark birds were (except female) until I saw the male...

The cowbirds are abundant in S Dakota so I knew him right off....

Beings that this is Florida, there are 'shrooms...this one appeared in our backyard...

The mourning doves are plentiful...

As you can see by this shot...which also captured Mo/Larry/Curly zipping up the maple tree...and a chipping sparrow at the green feeder.

Our daughter visited for a week in early December...we had perfect weather the day we got our beach therapy.  Here she's greeting some brown pelicans as they do a fly by....

There isn't much variety of shore birds at the beach here, I'm sad to say, at least not that I've found yet...will try to explore the Intracoastal Waterway side soon...of course there's gulls; this is an immature (winter) ring-billed gull.

The willets are a common sight at the beach...

As are the sanderlings...

...Back on the "ranch"...a female cardinal poises for a shot at the feeder while Mo/Larry/Curly hangs on the maple tree...the cardinals are very common and plentiful, and a bit hoggish of the feeders...

A red-shouldered hawk visited recently...a step up the food chain from the other feathered visitors...

While trying to snap the hawk, I heard a familiar drumming sound...and could just make out this pileated woodpecker in a pine tree a couple houses down, and waaaay up high...

This was the first time I saw a blue jay eating suet instead of the seeds...

Naturally I could only get one blurry shot of this bright yellow fellow... a pine warbler...

Hubby and I went for a bicycle ride yesterday... and discovered a couple of these bright red mushrooms like the ones always depicted in fantasy art that includes faeries and elves...when we got back home we jumped in the car and drove back to the spot so I could take some photos.  :o)  Do you think they're poisonous?  Hmm.

Well, I'll see you next year...I hope everyone had a lovely holiday season and will have a healthy, exciting 2013!  See you in the new year...