Spring Shift & Jay Blanchard Park

    Here in central Florida, we're well into the spring season, and just starting to see hints of the hotter summer months not far ahead. It has been 7 months since Ru and I finished our 4 month job in Hawaii, and we are quite slow to get ourselves truly settled in. But we are making slow progress little by little. We weren't here last summer, so I am try to prep mentally for the hot humid yuckiness of June - Sept. Yea right, as if! I'll be staying indoors 99% of the time!

    My lack of motivation encompasses birding, except for enjoying the daily entertainment our backyard birds (and squirrels) provide us with.  When I try to sit outside in our screened lanai to read, I have a hard time ignoring the almost constant action!

    The smaller birds are nearly all gone..the pine warblers, the goldfinches, and the chipping sparrows. I did see a Carolina wren a couple days ago, first one after many weeks. The blue jays, our one red-bellied woodpecker pair, and the No. cardinals are here year-round....(it HAS been one year since we moved into our house!) We also have too many mourning doves...minus one as of yesterday, thanks to the "sharp-shinned hawk" that I posted about previously...having now seen it up closer, I think it's a  Cooper's hawk after all. (Sharp-shinned only winters here.) It scours our feeders regularly, unfortunately. We do have a newcomer, a brown thrasher! I had seen a few last spring in neighbors' yards but this is the first to hang out at our house...it seems to like the suet, which has become so popular it only lasts about 3 days! Yikes! Someone is snarfing under the coverage of night!

    We recently took a day trip to the Orlando area with our new friends/neighbors, starting with a visit to Jay Blanchard Park, where there is a paved biking trail that starts along a canal. While our friends biked, we strolled part of the canal and enjoyed seeing many shore birds....plus a gator...I definitely got a really good dose of birding that day! .......

Right off, a common moorhen near the canal's shore, puttering about...

There was also a mucky adult white ibis on the canal's edge....

Along with 4-5 immature white ibises.....

And ~ oh excitement! ~ a limpkin! A lifer! According to the Stokes field guide, found only in Florida....

There were some red-winged blackbirds around...that was a surprise since I haven't been seeing them anymore in our area....

We came to a spot where two swallow-tailed kites were circling around overhead...I managed an okay shot, which is a small miracle, as bad as I am at shooting moving "targets"...this was the first time I've seen them so close up. We saw some at quite a distance in S Florida last year.

We were sitting on a bench, watching a great blue heron flying low over the canal....

Peek-a-boo! The gator we'd seen several yards back, was still within sight on the opposite edge of the canal...As the heron flew over the gator, the gator lunged half-heartedly at the heron, totally missed...
Toto, weren't not in Kansas anymore...

Back near our resting spot...plenty of these little buggars in our own backyard...this one was looking for hand-outs...

As we headed back towards our car, an anhinga (immature or small/young male) came to shore right in front of us...look closely & you can see a string around its neck...

While attempting to get photos of a moseying little blue heron, we witnessed it capture and swallow a frog....whole...

Whaa fwaug-g-g?! Trying to look innocent....but what about the large lump in its throat? Oh yuck.

And the little blue heron continues hunting, like nothing happened...

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Back on the home front, here's the Cooper's hawk with the remains of its catch, below the feeders...ok there's only a wing, did it honestly eat the whole body, bones and all?! I discovered the miscreant upon return from a leisure bicycle ride....

Our newest "family" member, the brown thrasher...not a hermit thrush. Has white wing tips, golden eyes, and a long tail. It's getting over its camera shyness...As you can see below, it manipulates its tail out of the way. Sometimes it appears to not even have a tail.  Which reminds me, the tail-less mockingbird from last year is back and hanging in the back yard quite a bit now. Let's hope Mr. Cooper leaves it alone!

"Peanutbutter and... raisins?! Where's the chocolate?!"

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...

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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.