Birding Days in the Sunshine State

March 22, 2024

Most of the year I’m out taking pictures in my home state of Michigan, but I always look forward to our change-of-pace visits to Florida during the winter months where I can go looking for all the beautiful birds that I rarely, if ever, find in Michigan. This was our first trip back in three years; a welcome change after more than two years of COVID, and the deaths of our two very old dogs.

Brown Pelicans on the pier waiting for a handout from the fisherman

One of my favorite Florida birds to photograph is the brown pelican. It is both charmingly elegant and absurdly acrobatic. I have found them posing stoically on a pier waiting for a tasty handout from the fishermen, and I have watched in amazement as they soar into the air, contorting their bodies like pretzels, and then plunging head first into the water. What a fun bird to watch and photograph!

By comparison, Florida also has the American white pelican; an equally fun bird to photograph, but without the acrobatic skills of its cousins, the Browns. White pelicans are scoopers not divers. They glide gracefully along the water and scoop up fish, often working cooperatively with their peers to herd a school of fish into a dense ball or toward shallow waters where it’s more difficult for the fish to escape. Cooperative herding catches more fish!

American White Pelicans sharing a funny joke in the early morning hours

A much smaller, less obvious shorebird that scurries about on the Florida coastlines is the willet. I’ve found at least one willet, usually more, on every one of my beach walks. They skitter tirelessly in and out of the waves searching for crabs, crustaceans, and mollusks in the water-soaked sands, and provide endless entertainment for me as I amble along the shore.

Willet hoping for a tasty snack to show up in the receding waves

Running around with the willets at an even faster pace, are the tiny, two-ounce sanderlings. It doesn’t seem possible that these little birds can run as fast as they do! Their little black legs are a blur as they race back and forth along the beach like cartoon characters, stopping only for a millisecond to probe the wet sand for crabs and other invertebrates left by the receding waters. Rachel Carlson, in her book Under the Sea Wind, poetically described the sanderling’s breakneck run as a “twinkle of black feet.” What a perfect description!

Mixed in with the willets and the sanderlings, I might also find the ruddy turnstone; a smaller bird than the willet but bigger than the sanderling. Its name aptly describes both its appearance and what it does! This is a stocky, reddish-brown shorebird that flips over stones, shells, and seaweed looking for food. Sometimes there are dunlins in the mix as well; a little shorebird that looks similar to the sanderling but is slightly bigger and has a longer bill.

Then there are all the gulls, terns, and skimmers either flying overhead or taking a break along the shore! I took hundreds of pictures the other day of the Forster’s terns soaring above the ocean waves, then plunging into the water to catch a fish; and hundreds more shots of the black skimmers gliding just above the surface of the water with their lower beak barely touching the water as they scooped up fish! It’s always a fun challenge trying to catch these birds in flight!

Another bird in flight that’s fun to catch is the Osprey. We have osprey in Michigan, but I rarely find them. In Florida, you can find them everywhere, hovering over both large and small bodies of water, preparing to plunge feet first into the water and grab a fish with their sharp talons! I like to catch them as they emerge from the water, a good-sized fish in tow, lifting into the air with a thousand beads of water spinning off their feathers in all directions.

When I’m not walking along the ocean beaches looking for birds, I’m stalking the smaller bodies of water in search of herons, egrets, ibises, storks, and the mostly elusive roseate spoonbills. On this particular visit to Florida, my first wood stork and spoonbill were standing at the edge of a retention pond, behind a locked fence along a busy roadway near a strip mall! It was not an easy picture to get! The herons, ibises and egrets, on the other hand, have been much more cooperative!

Then there are birds that I’ve seen on previous trips to Florida, but have yet to find here in St. Augustine; birds like the black-bellied whistling ducks, black-necked stilts, crested caracaras, glossy Ibis, gallinules, painted buntings, and sandhill cranes with their babies. To find some of those birds, Mel and I took road trip to the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Titusville, Florida.

Merritt Island is one hundred miles south of where we are now and is billed as “one of Florida’s premier birding sites.” It was established in 1963 for the protection of migratory birds and provides a wide variety of habitats including coastal dunes, saltwater marshes, scrub, pine flatwoods, and hardwood hammocks. It is home to more than 1,500 species of plants and animals!

Black-necked Stilt at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge

To get to Merritt Island, we left before dawn and arrived by 8:00 a.m. Mel and I wanted to have the entire day to wander around the refuge –and take a ridiculous number of pictures! We found black-necked stilts, common gallinules, reddish egrets, glossy ibises, roseate spoonbills, and a variety of other delightful birds. It was a day well spent!

In less than two weeks we’ll be heading back to Michigan; just in time for the daisies and the daffodils, the chatty red-winged blackbirds, the rose-breasted grosbeaks, and the comforting sounds of the spring peepers drifting through the screens on a warm April evening; all the sights and sounds I love to welcome me home!

Sandhill Crane and colt from our last trip to Florida in 2020

Down the Rabbit Hole

October 21, 2023

‘Down the rabbit hole’ is an English-language idiom which refers to getting deep into something, or ending up somewhere strange—or wonderful. Lewis Carroll introduced the phrase in 1865 as the title for Chapter One of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

I tumbled down the nature photography rabbit hole quite by accident and I fell in deep. It all started about seven years ago when my husband asked me what I wanted for Christmas. It took a while for me to come up with something I really wanted, but eventually I hit upon the idea of a camera. I wanted a better one than we had. My request came when we had two small grandchildren and I thought if I had a better camera, I could take better pictures of them. But that’s not what happened!

We went to Florida for the first time that winter and visited some of the most amazing preserves with incredible wildlife. It gave me the opportunity to use my new camera for the very first time. It wasn’t a fancy camera, but it did have a built-in zoom lens and I could get much better shots of birds and other wildlife than I ever had before! I was hooked! (The pictures below were taken with more recent cameras.)

Within a year or so, I was already yearning for a better camera and a longer lens; a camera with a quicker shutter response time, and a lens that could capture birds that were even farther away. Once I had the newer camera and the longer lens (thanks to my husband’s diligent research), I spent more and more time outdoors taking pictures, totally immersed in my own little world.

It wasn’t long before I had exhausted the shutter life of that second camera, with well over 100,000 pictures, and started looking for yet another camera and an even longer lens!

To date, I’ve gone through four cameras in seven years, mostly because I exceed the recommended shutter life of each of them. My current camera is a Nikon D500 with a shutter life of 200,000 cycles; I’m well over 127,000 after only a couple of years! The lens I use most often is a Sigma 150-600mm. The D500 camera and the Sigma lens have been the perfect combination for me and for the things I like to photograph.

Nikon camera with Sigma lens on a monopod

I go out almost every day in all kinds of weather, even if ‘going out’ means just standing on our deck or in our backyard. Some of my favorite shots have happened right outside our back door where I have a ‘designated tree stump,’ placed in the yard, and a ‘designated tree branch’ attached to the deck for bird and mammal ‘portraits’. Plus, we have a beautiful bank of trees nearby and a small creek behind the house, both of which are attractive to a variety birds and mammals.

Red-breasted Nuthatch on the ‘portrait branch’

I love going on picture walks! I love looking for interesting things to photograph, whether it’s a bald eagle or a green bottle fly! It’s all quite fascinating, especially when I bring up the pictures on my computer and can see so many amazing details—like the individual hairs on a fly, or the tiny red mites on a dragonfly!

Male Monarch (males have two distinct black spots on the lower wings)

One of the things I also enjoy doing after taking all those pictures is finding interesting facts about the creatures I’ve photographed and then sharing what I’ve found on Facebook, our local newspaper, or this blog.

Two male grackles on my ‘designated stump’ engaging in ‘bill tilt’ behavior to establish dominance. Whichever bird can maintain this posture the longest wins!

The name ‘picture walks’ started years ago when I first fell down this rabbit hole and was heading out the front door for a walk. If I was leaving the house without my camera, I’d tell my husband I was going on a ‘regular walk’, which meant I’d be home in an hour. If I was leaving the house with my camera in hand, I’d say I was going on a ‘picture walk,’ which was code for “I won’t be home anytime soon!”

White-tailed Deer in our backyard only a few feet from where I was standing

Some of the rabbit holes we fall into can be disastrous.

This one has been quite delightful.

Waiting for Spring

February 22, 2023

On February 12th, I saw my first red-winged blackbird for the season! It seemed too early, I thought. I didn’t expect them to return until March. Within a week, though, I heard a whole chorus of red-winged blackbirds singing in the cattails down by the creek behind our house. It’s the quintessential sound of spring and I love it! I wanted to throw open all our windows and soak up that first glimmer of hope that spring would soon be here in earnest.

**Backyard Blue Jay in the early morning light**

But as I write this, I’m snuggled up in front of a fire, with a hot cup of tea close by, hoping we won’t lose power during the upcoming ice storm. All the schools are closed, and so are many businesses, hoping to avoid disaster. The ice storm might materialize, it might not. Such are the vagaries of winter in Michigan: one day it feels like spring, and the next day it feels like we’re living in Antarctica.

**Canada Goose making a dramatic landing on the ice!**

I basically have a love/hate relationship with winter. I love the snow, but hate the long overcast days that bring the snow. I love getting pictures of all the winter birds that migrate through Michigan, but hate all the layers and layers of clothing I have to wear to get those pictures. I love a bright, sunny winter day as an antidote to all the gloomy ones, but it’s hard to get a good picture on a brilliant sunny afternoon against a snowy background.

**A happy looking female Mallard on a cold winter day in Michigan**

Most of all, I miss the colors and all the warm-weather critters I love to photograph, like the big yellow butterflies, the swampy green frogs, the multitudes of colorful dragonflies, and the iridescent blue swallowtails that nest under the bridge in a nearby park.

**Male Hooded Merganser on a layover through Michigan**

Before the pandemic and before we had an aging, incontinent dog to care for, we went to Florida for a few months where I could soak up all the colors and all the interesting critters we never see in Michigan. I have taken pictures of the majestic roseate spoonbills, the brilliant purple gallinules, the pastel pink dragonflies, and a million different Florida flowers! It’s a wonderland of color that I had come to depend on to get me through the drab days of a Michigan winter.

In the meantime, I have been out looking for whatever beauty I can find wherever I can find it, and taking lots of pictures. Whether it’s a chickadee in a snowstorm, a woodpecker on a sunny day, a snow-covered deer in our backyard, or a ubiquitous brown fox squirrel peeking out around a tree in the early morning light, it’s all good, and it’s all fun.

**White-tailed deer right outside our back door**

I just wish winter didn’t last so long!

Standing Still

April 9, 2020

My picture walks began a few years ago as a way to combine a little exercise with a little picture taking. Over time, the walks have become less and less about exercise and more and more about picture taking—mostly because I stop so often to take a look that I never get very far!

Greater Yellowlegs and a Tri-colored Heron

On my walks to the various preserves and rookeries, I often see other photographers who have picked a spot to take pictures and they never move, preferring instead, to stay in one place forever! I used to think this would be an incredibly boring thing to do, that I would miss so much if I just stayed in one place. But, over time, I’ve come to appreciate the benefits of just standing still.

Sandhill Crane with offspring (called a Colt)

Sandhill Crane Colt and White Egret nestling

That’s not to say that I have ever parked myself in one spot for hours on end, but I have, on several occasions, stood in one place for a good hour or so. I have found that by parking myself in one place for a while, I become part of the landscape; the birds and the butterflies no longer notice me and go about their business as if I weren’t there. The elusive Kingfisher, which has been extremely hard for me to capture, will land on a nearby branch unaware of my presence; the Black-crowned Night Heron will perch on a fence right in front of me, and the Roseate Spoonbill, totally oblivious to my presence, will continue fishing less than 20 feet away!

Roseate Spoonbill and a Black-crowned Night Heron

When I do stand still for a while and just observe what is going on around me, I find it very calming. I am so absorbed in what I might find, that it’s easy to forget life’s worries.

Male Four-spotted Pennant and a Female Needham’s Skimmer

Black-bellied Whistling Ducks and a White Egret

With the recent introduction of this deadly coronavirus into our lives, we are, as an entire planet, collectively standing still. We can look upon this time of isolation and social distancing as a colossal state of boredom, frustration and angst, or as an opportunity to more closely observe the life around us and to take stock of what’s truly important.

There is much that is beautiful to be found.

Be still. Be safe. Be well.

Maybe Tomorrow…

March 5, 2020

Mel and I have been to eight different nature preserves in as many days—both with cameras in hand.

Red-bellied Woodpecker and a Pileated Woodpecker

Great Blue Heron with the catch of the day!

One of my favorite new places that we visited was the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Naples, Florida, described as “a journey into the heart of the Everglades ecosystem… a 2.5-mile adventure through pine flatwoods, wet prairie, around a marsh, and finally into the largest old growth Bald Cypress forest in North America.” I had to go!

Female Cardinal, Indigo Bunting (male non-breeding plumage)

Mama Alligator and her babies (look below her for the babies)

I wasn’t particularly interested in finding the usual swamp creatures like alligators and turtles, I’d already seen plenty of them. What I really hoped to find was a painted bunting. They are such incredibly beautiful birds– and I had never seen one before!

White Peacock Butterfly and a Zebra Longwing

Ironically, Mel and I spent 5 hours taking pictures along the boardwalk, but I didn’t get my bunting picture until we were back at the visitor’s center and I saw one hanging out near the bird feeders! (I prefer to get my birdies out ‘in the wild’ rather than by a feeder, but I was not about to pass this one up over a technicality!)

Another new place we visited was the Babcock Ranch Preserve Footprints Trail in Punta Gorda. Unfortunately, the trail had just undergone a controlled burn and several areas near the trail were still smoldering. Even though we had a hard time finding much of anything to photograph, Mel spotted the one thing I had hoped to find the most—a Barred Owl. Everywhere we go, we look up in the trees hoping to spot an owl, but they are usually well camouflaged and hard to find. This one was high up in a tree, but otherwise visible. I zoomed in, took dozens of shots, and left happy. What a treat!

All the other places we visited this past week or so, Celery Fields in Sarasota, Ollie’s Pond in Port Charlotte, Lemon Bay Park in Englewood, and the State College of Florida in Venice were places we had visited before at one time or another. They are all dependable places for finding birds, butterflies, bugs or alligators– and we were not disappointed!

With all the preserves that Mel and I visited, we ended up with thousands of pictures. Not surprisingly, it takes hours and hours to go through them all. So sometimes, like today, we take a ‘picture holiday’ and just go for a walk without our cameras, but it’s really hard for me to do. I always see something that begs to be photographed! Today it was the iguanas and the dolphins that caught my eye. I didn’t get them today. Maybe tomorrow…

Scavenger Hunt

February 11, 2020

Going for a ‘picture walk’ is a lot like a scavenger hunt, I think. It’s not that I have a list of things to find, but every picture I take feels like a little treasure I’ve collected and put in my pocket. When I get home, I empty my pockets of all the things I’ve found and decide what to keep and what to throw away. The nice thing about this kind of treasure is that my pockets are always big enough! And that’s a good thing– because sometimes I have more than 500 treasures to sort through!

Here’s what I’ve collected this past week…