March 5, 2019
Yesterday evening Mel and I decided to drive a few miles down the road to Coffee Pot Park for a walk along the Coffee Pot bayou and then along Tampa Bay. Even though it wasn’t really going to be a ‘picture walk’, I took my camera along anyway—just in case.
There were just tons of different birds along the waterfront — but if Mel hadn’t had his binoculars, and I hadn’t had my camera with the long lens, it would have been impossible for us to discriminate all the different shapes that were out there! Even with our assistive devices in hand, we had no idea what many of the birds were. I was eager to know what we were seeing, so I took an excessive number of pictures—hoping I could identify them later.
Roseate Spoonbill 
Great Blue Heron
Even with my handy bird app and my giant bird book and Google, I still had trouble identifying some of them! There are just so many birds that look similar, and many birds that look entirely different when they are adults from when they are juveniles!
Sanderling 
Willet
Laughing Gull 
Black Bellied Plover
After many hours of sorting through my pictures and consulting with my resources, I’ve determined that we saw all of the following birds: brown pelicans, laughing gulls, sanderlings, dunlins, short billed dowitchers, black bellied plovers, black skimmers, great blue herons, reddish egret (maybe), roseate spoonbills, willets, marbled godwits and semipalmated plovers. If I have misidentified any of these birds, I certainly welcome corrections!
