Tag: Markham Park

Catching Up Is Hard To Do: Part 1

December 13, 2018

Hello friends! It’s been a while since my last post, so I’ll try to catch us up! Perhaps the most interesting happening (at least in my birding world) was the sighting of an American Flamingo in Brevard County in late October . The overall status of the American Flamingo in Florida is still being debated, but whatever fruits that argument bears doesn’t alter how rare a wild flamingo is for the Space Coast. But of course, that’s the real question, isn’t it? Where did this bird come from? It was non banded, but that’s hardly a foolproof indication of a wild bird. It’s possible it was stirred up from our southern neighbors by Hurricane Harvey and was taking an extended tour, or maybe someone had it as a “pet’ and “lost” it. There’s no way to know.

This severely cropped photo was the best shot I could get of the distant bird (it was seen much closer by others, but seemed to prefer to feed well away from the road to Playalinda in the afternoons it was with us).

An American Flamingo stands far away against a distant backdrop of mangrove trees in shallow water.
Not a lawn ornament.

In any case, it was a good reason to get out with Sarah and Bella Muro again and find this bird, as well as checking out part of the Buck Lake Conservation Area [map] with them. The birding was a little light, but we had a few good looks at the recently arrived Eastern Phoebes and a few warblers sprinkled in for good measure.

An Eastern Phoebe perched on a branch surrounded by spare foliage.
Eastern Phoebes started arriving in October and will be our guests until Spring.

Here’s our Buck Lake eBird list (I’ll spare you the Merritt Island lists – the American Flamingo was the star of that show):
https://ebird.org/view/checklist/S49694824

There was little time to rest before the Fall Florida Ornithological Society (FOS) meeting in Davie, FL the first weekend in November. I’d been looking forward to the weekend for months.

The sessions and keynotes were good, and it is always great to catch up with birding friends I haven’t seen in a while. I didn’t take too many photos, but the field trips were pretty good. Dave Goodwin, Jim Eager, Charlie Fisher, and I went out on our own on Saturday to Evergreen Cemetery in Fort Lauderdale [map]. We were hoping for some late migrants, but those were few and far between.

Wide shot of a cemetery with a large tree on the right side. There are a few Muscovy ducks wandering among the graves.
Evergreen Cemetery has some mature trees and is an important green space in the middle of urban south Florida.

You can see our eBird list below:
https://ebird.org/view/checklist/S49640385

From there we went to Markham Park [map], which borders the Everglades. We were hoping for Spot-breasted Orioles, but after getting distracted at the canal overlooking the Everglades, we spent most of our time there, scanning the grasses for Grey-headed Swamphens and Purple Gallinules. We got a distant but long look at a White-tailed Kite, too.

The golden and green grasses of the Everglades, with some patches of open water, stretch out to the horizon under mostly overcast skies. Powerlines cross the foreground between the horizon and top of the photo.
The vast expanse of the Everglades never ceases to impress, even with the closeness of the power lines and a major highway (off to the left).

The next day, I went to the soon-to-open Fran Reich Preserve [map], in Palm Beach County. It borders the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. They are separated by a canal and levee system, preventing any meaningful ecological continuity, however. Primarily scrub and open habitat, the main draw was the hope of some early wintering sparrows. It took some careful stalking, but eventually we managed to flush some Lincoln’s Sparrows, of which I got a good look at one!

Perhaps the bigger stars of the show were the non-avian friends we came across! First was a magnificent Green Lynx Spider, staking out her claim on a goldenrod plant (Solidago stricta, according to botanophiles).

A Green Lynx Spider sits, head pointing down, on a yellow flowering plant. A person's lower leg and athletic shoe are slightly out of focus in the background.
Lynx spiders are good at insect control and seldom bite people. She probably has spent her whole life on this one plant.

The biggest oohs and aahs, particularly from the students we had along with us, were directed at a praying mantis. It was comfortable enough with being handled, that it even stopped to groom it’s legs, relatively unperturbed by all the humans crowding around.

praying-mantis-cleaning
Some of the students speculated that this was a female praying mantis, given it’s slightly distended abdomen, possibly indicating eggs developing inside.

The remainder of the FOS meeting was informative and entertaining, but it was good to get back home after a weekend away.

Later in November, I finally got to meet up with my friend Annie Otto and hike and bird one of her favorite places, Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTMNERR, or “Guana”) [map]. It was a beautiful day, if a bit windy (although the trees protected us from the brunt of the gusts).

Wooded trail in the foreground curving to the left with some mixed deciduous and coniferous trees in the middle and background.
The climate and land cover at Guana is just sufficiently different from east-central Florida to make for a good change of scenery.

The bird of the day had to be the Yellow-rumped Warblers, which had arrived with succeeding cold front in the previous weeks. Dozens of them would seemingly fall out of the sky into the trees, along with Ruby-crowned Kinglets, some Eastern Phoebes and even some late season migrants, like Blackburnian, Black-throated Blue, and Cape May Warblers.

Annie is the manager of the Tomoka Marsh Aquatic Preserve, and was fun to talk to about the area and some of her personal history as a conservationist and outdoors enthusiast.

Here’s our e-bird list:
https://ebird.org/view/checklist/S49867781

Just before my adventure with Annie, I did get an e-mail from Mitchell Harris, and that will be the focus of the start of Part 2!