Big Day in the Sea of Grass

  My usual pattern of doing a Lake County Big Day had to be interrupted this month since my lovely wife and I took a much-needed vacation over spring break to the Florida Keys. There are a few more people down here than I would like, but the scenery, the weather, and the birds are awesome. A vacation from the sub-arctic of northern Illinois does NOT mean a vacation from Big Day birding, however, and my wife graciously agreed to be my partner for a big day excursion in the Everglades. Now, one of the things I like most, aside from the birds, about big days is the challenge of route planning. This is really difficult for me because I am an inherent perfectionist, so it's easy for me to get frustrated with my decisions. Picking a route through a place you have only been to twice before isn't easy, so I predictably made a few logistical errors which, no doubt, cost us some good birds, but we saw some pretty cool birds, also, so that made up for it.
  My wife, being the saintly individual that she is, was highly sacrificial in her love yesterday, as well, seeing that she is not a birder AND she enjoys sleep......a lot. For her to stay up for 18+ hours in a row and help me find birds aint really her thang, but she was great and still amazes me after 22 years. She was my official photographer yesterday, so she took some pics of the more easily-viewed birds and a nice selfie for reference :

  So, anyway, we started our adventure in Homestead, Fla. at the 24 hr. Starbucks with a nice Hazelnut Latte for the road around 12:15am and headed down SR 9336 toward the glades. 

   Night birding is also one of my favorite parts of big day birding. The sounds you hear are awesome and even ones you may hear during the day sound so much cooler at night, especially in the Glades. As mentioned in previous blogs, I'm not a big fan of the dark, and venturing into the Everglades with its Florida Panthers, black bears, and large alligators carried with it a certain amount of irrational anxiety, especially since my wife was with me, and I feel the inherent need to protect her from such beasts. Normally I travel in the dark with other men much bigger than I so no worries. If I'm the biggest one in the group at a towering 5'8 150, that makes me worry a bit. It all turned out fine, of course, but there were some "strange-walking -and-rustling-in-grasses-sound" moments that made us quicken our steps a bit. The experience was very cool, though. Unfortunately the bird sounds, while high in number, were very low in diversity. I think we only had 6 night species, and we covered the area from Ernest Coe all the way to the Coastal Prairie Trail at the west end of Flamingo. It's also difficult at night without using playback. Since the use of playback is outlawed at ENP, and all NP's, we had to just listen and pish once in a while. This makes it tough. These were the 6 species we had at night:

1. Chuck-Will's-Widow- the numbers were astounding. 21 birds is a conservative estimate. They were calling everywhere in the pinelands. No whips unfortunately.

2. Clapper/King Rails- also very numerous in the sawgrass areas to the NE. Not sure which of these it was. The habitat favored King Rail, and the calls could have been the first part of "chick-burr" calls, but the sounds were "chick-chick-chick", etc. with no "burr" ever, so it could have been the Kek-kek-kek" of clapper rails, which it actually sounded more like. There were a lot of them, though, probably 8 or 9.

3. Barred owl- had 2 calling adults and 2 fledglings in a known nesting area:

4. grunting Great Blue Heron
5. screaming Osprey
6. Black-crowned Night Heron- quawking
7. saw a Roseate Spoonbill at Eco Pond.
  That was it for night birds. The Coastal Prairie Trail, though we only walked out about 100 yes into the prairie yielded nothing but silence.
  Once daylight hit, the first conundrum was where to start. I wanted to hear the Seaside Sparrows at Mahogany Hammock, but you need to catch them early. This was my first mistake. Never sacrifice many birds for 1 bird. While I did hear the SEASIDE SPARROWS, but never saw them (they must have been sitting low in the grass), I can't help thinking that hitting Eco Pond and Snake Bight early would have yielded a few migrant warblers and sparrows, of which I had virtually none for the day and was probably my biggest disappointment. In any case, we quickly sped from Flamingo to the main rd. just south of Mahogany to hear the sparrows, then journeyed over to Gate 15 mound. This was my next error. Doing this side route was a total time suck. The biggest problem was that I had never been to this spot before, but the birds seen and heard here according to ebird were awesome, so I thought I might get lucky. Wrong. Though we did have a nice cruising black SHORT-TAILED HAWK on this overcast morning, we got nothing else of note, and since I had no idea where exactly to go, we stopped and turned around. Next visit I will have to get some intel on this area.
  From here we went to Research Rd. and had a few good birds, including EASTERN MEADOWLARK, NORTHERN HARRIER, and GRASSHOPPER SPARROW, but no other sparrows, which I was hoping for. From here we headed to the Anhinga Trail where I was hoping for a Bittern or two and some gallinules, but we incredibly whiffed on all of them. I should also say that it has been a really wet year down here, so water levels were high and habitat for rails near the trails was not good. We had 1 COMMON GALLINULE at the end of the day at Nine-mile Pond, but we whiffed on Purple Gallinule. This still amazes me. I've always seen multiple numbers of Purple's on my previous visits here. Can't beat the photo ops of waders and the namesake bird, though, so here's a couple nice ones:

                             
                                                                Tricolored Heron

Little Blue Heron

Anhinga

     There were a lot of gators as well. Many were doing a lot of grunting and sounding very prehistoric. A couple were seriously big:

And seriously CLOSE

  By now it was 11:00ish and starting to get warm. The bird activity was definitely decreasing, so as we headed to Flamingo, I knew our productivity would decrease. At Eco Pond we saw the usual waders but virtually 0 warblers, save for Yellow-rumps, and no sparrows at all. Best bird here was a basic plumage AMERICAN AVOCET, but that was the only shorebird other than the resident BLAC K-NECKED STILTS. Tough to complain about dozens of Black-necked Stilts, though. Gorgeous birds.

And a couple nice waders:

                                         Tricolored Heron (left) and imm Little Blue Heron (right)

Also, the numbers of singing WHITE-EYED VIREOS here and everywhere else was astounding. We probably had 25 of these birds on they day. These guys along with singing PRAIRIE WARBLERS, and NORTHERN CARDINALS made up almost all of the birdsong on the day.
  So, we're starting to get a little warm right now, so we decide to get in the water and take a canoe trip to Snake Bight. It's about 1:00pm and low tide is at 5:00 so I think we have plenty of time, which we did, but we only paid for a 3 hr. trip. I sorely underestimated the time it would take to get out there. I figured about an hour each way, but it would be more like 1.5 each way. This may seem like a long time but you're usually looking at birds along the way, or at least we were the last time we did this. Today was a different story. There were virtually no birds at all near the visitor center and Flamingo Bay was similarly an avian desert. Very unexpected and not well understood......by me anyway. The trip out was long and arduous, but this is really the only way to see the shorebirds well in Snake Bight. This brings up the second problem: I chickened out. As we were paddling out, I noticed that I was hitting ground, and as we entered Florida Bay, the canoe bottom was actually hitting sand. I immediately had visions of us stranded in the bay at low tide and told my wife that we needed to abort the mission and head back. I learned two things from this poorly-informed decision: 1. the water is deeper near the shore next to the mangroves. I saw both kayakers and boats out in the bay at low tide near the shore; and 2. You can't see the shorebirds well without getting out into the bight by canoe. I only saw 4 shorebirds yesterday and this was largely why. Here's me laboring while my wife is shooting pics :)

Best bird of our kayak trip was a nice red phase REDDISH EGRET. Very Sweet bird, but too distant for a photo.

  We were pretty hot, tired, and famished at this point so we had a nice leisurely late lunch at the Flamingo Cafe which is seriously understaffed and has your basic greasy diner food, but it definitely hit the spot, and our waitress was very sweet despite being mercilessly overworked (the whole place was packed with people and there were 2 waitresses and 0 busboys).
  Now that we were fully sated with tasty food and at least somewhat rested, I thought I would make my worst decision of the day. Lets walk down Snake Bight and back. Understand that Snake Bight is 1.5 miles each way and makes the Bataan Death March of walking down to the Dead River at IBSP and back seem like a party. The main difference between the 2 is that at IBSP you can watch for flyover birds on the lake AND you can see how far away the Dead River is. The Snake Bight Trail, at least when we were on it yesterday, had no birds to hear or look at and the scenery rarely changes. You can't see the end and it makes me crazy wondering how far I still have to walk. Compound that by the fact that it was hot, I had to wear rain gear, a hood, and netting on my head to keep from being eating by the hordes of mosquitoes, and you've got yourself a recipe for a really good torture sequence. It was brutal. I had to apologize profusely for making my wife, who never complained once (and she HATES bugs) endure that trek. And swore I would never make her suffer that hell again. There are also 0 shorebirds visible well enough to ID from the end of the trail at low tide. You can definitely see that there are many out there however, and I thought I saw a Whimbrel, but heat shimmer was too distorting.
  At this point, I still wanted to see if I could get some more shorebirds/terns so we headed back to the Flamingo visitor Center and I scanned the water for more birds. Best birds were 2 COMMON LOONS out in the bay, but not much else. There was a spit of sand that held many BLACK SKIMMERS and LAUGHING GULLS but the only terns were CASPIAN and ROYAL TERNS and there were 0 shorebirds. Really?.....0? Yes, 0.  Also had 1 AM. WHITE PELICAN which was a good bird for the day. Then I headed to the Amphitheatre which I had never been to before but which had some great ebird data. Unfortunately the only shorebird there was 1 WILLET, and the only other bird of note was my only SAVANNAH SPARROW of the day. My wife was cashed by this time, understandably, and we had pretty much seen every site in Flamingo. It was around 6pm at this point, so we began the trek back home to Islamorada. Here's where I made my best decision of the day to stop at all the roadside stops on the way back that required little to no walking. This allowed me to pick up my lifer WHITE-CROWNED PIGEONS on the far side of Nine-mile Pond. Identifiable but cruddy looks even through my scope, but a lifer nonetheless. Also had COMMON GALLINULE, BLUE-WINGED TEAL, and probably the best bird of the day, a GREATER SCAUP with its large forehead, on West Lake. Along the way we also stopped at Paurotis Pond with its large WOOD STORK colony, and got a nice shot of a guy in the parking lot:

  We ended up with 80 sp. on the day which was, as always, below my goal of 100, and there were numerous misses, but the biggest misses were Painted Bunting and Purple Gallinule, which are both signature birds. Didn't even HEAR a bunting clearly. Thought I had one at one point but only heard part of a non-repeated song. Bummer.

   As in any good Disney movie, though, there must be a happy ending, and the highlights were many, so I will end with those, especially after all my griping about misses and mistakes.

Highlights other than those previously mentioned, were these:

1. a personal best for raptors other than at the hawk watch with these birds:

         a. Short-tailed Hawk

         b. Red-shouldered Hawk- everywhere

         c. Cooper's Hawk- not common here, so this was nice

         d. Both vultures

         e. Northern Harrier

         f. Swallow-tailed Kite- had about 12, but most while driving and all while the camera was not       available of course.

        g. Bald Eagle

        h. Osprey- these are everywhere at Flamingo. And VERY vocal.

     i. Am. Kestrel

2. This place is famous for waders and we had many. Can't beat killer looks at ROSEATE SPOONBILLS, REDDISH EGRETS, and WOOD STORKS. WHITE IBISES are trash birds here. We also had a WURDEMANN'S HERON (white morph Great Blue) in Florida Bay.

3. Many BROWN-HEADED NUTHATCHES

4. 4 PILEATED WOODPECKERS

And others I'm sure I missed......

  It was really a great experience. Heck, it's the Everglades. And I obviously learned a lot from my mistakes. Hopefully I helped you a little bit if you plan on going there to look for some birds. Thanks for reading, now lets see if I can find that Lake County Barrow's Goldeneye that I missed while basking in the glory of the Everglades......

Here's the list:

Everglades Big Day

See you in April!