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I guarantee that the first thought had by many birders upon hearing the news of the Nightingale Thrush was, “How the heck did that bird get there?”.  Orange-billed Nightingale Thrush is a pretty common bird across Central America (I’ve seen them both in Guatemala and Costa Rica, more traveled birders have certainly seem them everywhere else) and reaches the northern terminus of its range in Tamaulipas, Mexico, not more than 250 miles south of Texas.  Even so given it’s proximity, it’s only been found in the US two times before, in 1996 and 2004, and it wouldn’t surprise you to know both of those records are from the Lower Valley.  Lots of birders plus adjacency to Mexico equals fabulous and surprising birds.  It always has.

So why did the third record of the species in North America become a wild outlier for Central American species in the US?  Who knows?  Those previous records were considered to be spring migrants overshooting their regular range, and while that might explain a couple hundred miles, this bird went another 1500 miles farther.  Across four states.  In mid-summer.  This species is known to occasionally be taken for the pet trade, but I hadn’t heard that this individual showed any wear suggesting it had a caged past.  So there’s a good chance it’s a legitimately wild bird, which immediately prompts the question of whether this sort of extreme vagrancy is just a freak occurrence that one birder was lucky to put himself in the right place at the right time, or is vagrancy in this part of the continent more regular than we know because the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas, along with western Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota are significantly underbirded?

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When a mega rarity is found anywhere on the continent, the twitcher yen starts to pull at your psyche.  Soon after, the “twitchers are bad for birding” folks come out of the woodwork.  I’m fairly ambivalent about chasing rarities, mostly because I’m guaranteed bad luck when it comes to finding vagrants (my batting average, as it were, is well below .500), but I don’t begrudge the odd birder the thrill of the chase.  The bottom line is that it’s fun, and I figure the amount of good work I try to do for conservation in my local community and the general “green-ness” with which I try to live my life cancels any carbon demon I might incur on the rare occasion a good bird calls to me.  I think most birders can say the same.  Besides, that part of the continent doesn’t really get much in the way of awesome drop-everything vagrancies, so if they chased it, I hope they got it and had a good time doing it.  I know some folks definitely did.

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Last, the bird itself was discovered by a fellow bird blogger, Eric Ripma, and the report distributed on his blog.  This is the most exciting part of the story for me, as I’m a big advocate of the nature blogosphere being a platform to not only to share and distribute rare bird sightings, but to report them in the first place.  This is something that is only going to be more prevalent as technology pervades even our time in the field.  I know there are plenty of folks that shudder at the prospect, as if something essential is being lost with the incursion of technology.  In the sense that birding and nature study is a way to pull away from the epidemic omnipresence of modernity in what is, in many ways, a pastoral 19th century pastime, I get that.  I do.

But the currency of the modern world is, beyond any doubt, information itself, and I can’t help but be excited when news of this magnitude is proliferated this way.  I’m strongly of the belief that the more information that is made as widely available as possible the better it is for birding, bird science, and bird conservation. In a practical sense, this means more reports like this Nightingale-Thrush, which besides simply being fun whether or not you decide to go after the bird, lead to more and better information about distribution and abundance for those who are pushing the horizons of our understanding of birds.  Information that, in turn, is disseminated back through the internet bird community in a feedback loop that lifts us all.

To be a good birder still takes the experience that can only be gained by time in the field.  That will never change, and we’re all better for it, but the barrier for entry is much lower, the starting point much closer, than it ever has been.  This is a great thing, and the bird blogosphere has a lot to do with that.  It’s a real sea change in the way we think about our hobby.  One for the better I say, but I imagine I can be considered sort of biased.

Oh yeah, some photos of the bird can be found here.  As of yesterday it was still there, singing away. Really cool stuff.

Of the three days, my favorite has to be the ferry ride from Swan Quarter to Ocracoke Island, a two and a half hour trip across the widest part of the sound.  These “poor man’s pelagics” offer the opportunity to get up close and personal with some near-pelagic species that are otherwise difficult to get a good look at from shore.  So while most people consider the ferry a necessary evil to get to scenic Okracoke Island, an isolated strip of sand only accessible by air or sea, we birders were out of our cars as soon as the horn blew, lined up against the railing with binoculars at the ready, scanning for loons and sea ducks.  We weren’t disappointed either, as rafts of Scoters, both American (née Black Scoter) and Surf rolled over the horizon.  These weren’t the juvenile birds I’d seen the month before, but adults  birds in all their full velvety black, giant-billed glory.  The water was even calm enough to pull out scopes right on the ferry deck.  The views were fantastic.

But Scoters, as cool as they are, weren’t our main target.  The Pamlico Sound ferry is one of the best places in the state to find Long-tailed Ducks, and when a black and white torpedo buzzed the port side of the ferry, everyone jumped to attention.  It wasn’t much longer before we found a small group of birds on the water, another stunning male and a few females.  Unlike regular pelagics however, no amount of begging and pleading keeps the North Carolina ferry system from completing its route, so our time with the birds was far too short.

By the time we rolled through Ocracoke and arrived at Hatteras via another ferry (a shorter trip this time) it was getting close to sun down.  But there was still a bird left to see, one that had been reported some time ago.  The long, pristine beaches of Cape Hatteras National Seashore attract birds as well as people, and this particular winter a Whimbrel had decided that it was a place worth sticking it out rather than continuing to migrate south.   While the little curlew is a regular migrant on our coast, a lingering winter bird is still unusual enough to draw attention, and to necessitate a special stop.

I took off back towards home after that, having to miss the next day.  I had to pick up my wife at the airport that evening if I remember right, and not even tales of a two lifer day would save me if I forgot that.

WHIMBR and LOTADU from wikipedia

So with the summer doldrums in full swing, and still a couple weeks away from shorebirds (and even then only if the heat pulls some water out of the reservoirs), the only thing I could realistically expect are the same 25 to 30 species of birds I’ve been seeing since mid-June.  Therefore, the only thing to do is to head to the next county over where those 25 species are brand new fantastical additions to the county list.  So I headed to Alamance County, just to the west of Chapel Hill, where I could rack up some numbers, even if they’re summer breeders.

I’d never heard of Cedarock Park before reading about it on the North Carolina Birding Trail, but I was impressed at well-manicured historical site that greeted me.  It had it all; campsites, playgrounds, hiking trails, not one but two disc golf courses and preserved Civil War era buildings appropriately fetishised in that manner I’ve always found bizarre for a region that overwhelmingly lost the war.  Piece that aspect of the regional psyche together and I think you’ve come a long way towards understanding some of the idiosyncrasies of the South.

In any case, what birds I found were overwhelmingly in the rough height of molt.  There were bald-headed Cardinals, Red-eyed Vireos that looked like they had mange, and even the Chickadees looked slightly blurry around the edges.

Breeding success was evident too.  Begging Vireos and Titmice and Cuckoos were around and seemingly ambivalent to keeping their whereabouts a mystery (though still hidden enough by leaves and branches to make photography frustratingly difficult). As I was leaving, having added as many birds as I was likely to before the wet July heat made being outside nearly unbearable, a family of squealing Chipping Sparrows in the gravel road.

Oh course, nearly all of those birds were new birds for Alamance County, doubling my total for the county and shooting it up the chart for my Carolina Century Club project.  Sure there was nothing out of the ordinary, but this time of year you take what you can get.

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Prior to the connection of North and South America by the Panamanian landbridge some 3 million years ago, the two continents were on wildly different evolutionary trajectories.  Pleistocene North America has a distinctly Eurasian flair, as the two continents have a long biogeographic history and many of the major animal groups that existed there are able to trace their origin either to the vast super-continent of Laurasia or from an arrival across the Bering Strait over the last several million years.  This included well-known families like Bears, Deer, Rabbits, Dogs, Cats and others who share close relatives in the Eastern Hemisphere.

South America was far more bizarre, having been part of the massive Gondwanaland Southern super-continent and sharing close biological ties with, of all places, Australia.  The rest of the Gondwanaland, Africa and India, continued on a collision course with Asia where their Pleistocene fates became intertwined, but South America and Australia stayed islands throughout most of the Cenozoic era, which allowed for the evolution of strange and bizarre creatures like those well known in Australia.  What is less well known is that South America had it’s own assemblage of oddities, and the fossil record shows monotremes like the Platypus and giant flightless predatory birds, not unlike Cassowaries and Emus of today in structure if not voracious appetite.  Some still exist in some form even today; in sloths and anteaters and the Rhea, but most of the biggest and baddest of South America’s fauna winked out by about 1 million years ago.

Why?  Well, you can lay the blame on Panama.  Once the two continents were connected it allowed terrestrial mammals that had been isolated for millions of years to interact in the geologic blink of an eye.  This hugely important paleozoographic event was called the (deep echoing voice here) Great American Biotic Interchange, and while the initial interchange was largely even-steven with both continent’s fauna making equal inroads, over time the Northern species won out by virtue of a few quirks of geography in their favor (a larger land mass offering greater selective pressure mainly).  In any case, this is why there are Bears and Dogs and Cats and Camelids in South America whereas the only mammals of South American origin to stick it out up here are the noble North American Porcupine, mostly cause no one wants to screw with it, and the Virginia Opossum, though it must be said that the Nine-banded Armadillo continues to make a valiant effort too. Perhaps there’s something to be said for elaborate defensive armory.

Ok, so why is this important?  This is, after all, a bird blog.  It turns out the prehistory of birds is a little less cut and dried.  Bird bones are fragile and don’t preserve well so how birds handled the (deep voice) Great American Biotic Interchange has largely been a mystery for a long time, especially with regard to neotropic-nearctic migrants like Warblers and Grosbeaks and Thrushes and such.  Did these birds evolve in North America to take advantage of South American wintering grounds, or did they evolve in South America to take advantage of the North American seasonal abundance?  In essence, does migration evolve towards off-season survival or towards new breeding success?

For a long time the second theory, called the Southern Home theory, has held sway, but modern bird science has some serious tricks at its disposal and recent findings using molecular data and phylogenetic evidence from over 100 genera of birds give more weight to the idea that those birds evolved here in North America rather than vice versa.

The results reveal that while ancient birds could fly most species did not cross the water between the two isolated continents, so were subject to the same constraints as their land based mammalian counterparts. The land bridge was therefore crucial in facilitating cross continental migration.

“This inter-continental migration was far from even. While within the tropics around the equator exchange was equal in both directions, between the temperate zones of North and South America it was not,” said [Brian Tilston] Smith [from the University of Nevada]. “Avian lineages from the northern Nearctic regions have repeatedly invaded the tropics and radiated throughout South America. In contrast species with South American tropical origins remain largely restricted to the confines of the tropical regions.”

And even more, the distribution of these birds of northern origin nearly exactly mirrors the distribution of mammals following the Interchange.

When considering the perching birds oscine and suboscine the team found that despite having northern ancestral origins, 55% of New World oscine species now breed in South America, many of them in tropical habitats. In contrast, only 2.4% of suboscines have secondarily adapted to North American temperate zone habitats.

For reference, oscine refers to the vocal organs that birds use to sing.  Most passerine families are oscine and commonly referred to as “songbirds” because of their elaborate songs.  Suboscines don’t have elaborate vocal organs, and thus typically don’t sing. They’re represented mostly by the Tyrant Flycatchers, who notable to this study reach the peak of their diversity in South America, but also by some other distinctly neotropical families like Antbirds and Contingas.  Our flycatchers though, are those 2.4% of birds that have adapted to North America against heavy odds, very much like the Porcupine and the Armadillo.

So it seems our migrants, despite spending most of the year in the neotropics and offering colors that seem definitively tropical, are in fact North American to the core.  Lucky us.

It just so happened that very week down Wilmington way a bizarre sea duck duo was making waves among the state birding community not only for their Carolina novelty but for the ease in which one could see them.  Both would have been lifers for me so with the prospect of not one, but two new additions to the ole list my decision was hardly a difficult one to make.

Wrightsville Beach is a long slip of sand just off of the mainland north of Wilmington, North Carolina.  At the center of the island a concrete pier, a sturdy replaced for a wooden predecessor destroyed by a hurricane, sticks a couple hundred meters out into the ocean.  The pier is a popular fishing spot for locals and at it’s base sits a bait shop and diner where you pay one yankee dollar for the privilege of hauling your stuff all the way out to the end.  That’s quite a deal even for a birder, especially when waiting at the end are a juvenile Common Eider and a juvenile Harlequin Duck circling the concrete pylons together like a regular Abbot and Costello.  Why these two vagrants from farther north would stick together like that is anybody’s guess.  Maybe it’s like going to a party full of strangers and hanging with the one guy you met and pleasantly talked about baseball one time.  I dunno, but the bird’s two man routine continued for several weeks and several Carolina birds got the photos to prove it.

After enjoying the dynamic duo, I was feeling pretty good.  So I headed up to the north end of the island to look at the inlet where wintering shorebirds are often found.  A pale spot on the mud turned into a Piping Plover.  I was suddenly up to three for the day and in no mood to stop.

Where to then?  Why not Fort Fisher?

A cool 20 minutes later I was pulling up to an artificial stone outcropping just across from the old Civil War era fort to scope a raft of Buffleheads diving into the waves.  One pass through and I realized that these were not all Buffleheads, but an equal number of juvenile Black Scoters.  This was turning out to to be quite the sea duck-stravaganza.  Closer inspection netted a single juvenile Surf Scoter in the crowd as well, all big billed and spotty headed and not wasting time diving with spread wings.  As I considered my luck at the leisurely way in which I was able to observe these ducks not more than 20 feet from the shoreline and thinking wouldn’t it be something to pick up the scoter slam, I lifted my head from the scope to catch out of the corner of my eye two additional ducks, larger ones this time, slowly making their way down the shoreline towards the birds I was watching.  The scope pivoted, the focus knob turned, and suddenly I was staring at two White-winged Scoters slowly integrating into the rest of the flock.  A Scoter three-peat to put a ribbon a pretty remarkable sea duck day in the southeast.

What are the odds of this?  I’ve birded the south coast of NC in the winter several times since then, including this precise rocky outcrop, and while I’ve seen Black Scoters often and Surf Scoters slightly less often, I’ve never found White-winged Scoters in this spot since.  I did, however, end the year with 28 life birds, blowing 1995 out of the water and ready to break it again for 2007.

COMEID and SURSCO from wikipedia

So the question the blogger has to answer in what is often a solitary existence shouting at the void that is the internets, is “Why?”.  Why do you write?  Why do you continue to write? What do you get out of it?  Ok that last one isn’t a Why, but it’s related, and maybe after three years, a near eternity in cyberspace, I have some semblance of an answer.

I write because it makes me a better naturalist. Birders have a tendency to be a bit oblivious of other forms of life at times.  I’m certainly guilty of that.  But my attempt to always search for content for this blog has opened my eyes to plants, insects, invertebrates, and any number of interesting things I’m likely to find when the birds are not busy.  I’m not going to start a butterfly or dragonfly list anytime soon, but being aware of what I see, whether or not it has feathers, has been a journey that reminds my of my early days birding.  And that’s been really fun.

I write because yes, I certainly wouldn’t turn down the odd opportunity to do this for some money and it’s nice to have a place where I can force myself to face my inadequacies as a writer and constantly improve.  Writing is a muscle.  You use it or you lose it and forcing myself to keep to a schedule and, yes, to even write when I don’t feel like writing has helped me maintain a more consistent voice as well as honing those skills.  So from a personal perspective, these three years have been useful if nothing else and I have an entire catalog of writing samples, some better than others, to draw upon should I need additional inspiration.

Mostly though, I write because I enjoy the conversation.   The blogosphere, specifically the nature blogosphere, feels like a community.  And as in all communities the sum total is greater than the individual parts.  Occasionally I can instigate the turning of the gears in a way that sparks some interesting discussion or help those gears turn towards a greater good, but for the most part the discussion in and of itself is worth the price of entry.  I’ve met people through blogs that I now consider personal friends regardless of whether I’ve met them in person. In fact, communicating online has led to face-to-face contact more often than not which has been a pleasant surprise.

There are some amazing voices out there, and that number grows every day.  Three years in may make me something of an old man in the nature blogosphere, but I’m happy to continue to be a part of it.  On to the next three!

By the time the day wore into afternoon, the birds were slowing down and the tide was coming in.  Men with nets were starting to wade into the area behind the marked waterbird nesting area where I’d been set up, and what birds that were there, mostly Wilson’s Plovers and Willets, had split for higher ground as the sand flats they had been foraging in slowly disappeared beneath the advancing water.  All the people walking around were really cramping my birding so I tried to find a more secluded spot, ending up down by the end of the marsh where there were no birds beyond the omnipresent Boat-tailed Grackles, but hundred of Fiddler Crab burrows whose occupants where busy grazing on the mud, fighting amongst each other and generally doing the things that Fiddler Crabs do.

In my subsequent attempts to identify them to species, I ran into the dilemma nearly all would-be invertebrate identifiers are familiar with.  There is no singular “Fiddler Crab”, there are about 100 species of Fiddler Crabs in the genus Uca distributed around the world which all look essentially identically large clawed and spindly and are only differentiated by things like oblique ridges of small granules on the inner surface of the larger claw extending from the lower margin to the wrist cavity.  And here I though Empids were tough.

Fortunately my focused googling turned up a really useful document (.pdf) from the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources on Fiddler Crab identification.  Turns out the East coast of the United States is home to three species of Fiddler Crabs, only two of which are found in salt-marshes (the other prefers freshwater marshes).   So my crabs in question were either Atlantic Mud Fiddler Crabs (Uca pugnax) or Sand Fiddler Crabs (Uca pugilator).  By virtue of their leg color (dark), I determined them to must likely be the Mud Fiddlers, though according to the document both Mud and Sand Fiddlers can be found together in the same place so it’s quite possible both were present and a few of the crabs seemed to have paler legs than others.  Who knows?  Perhaps I should have been paying closer attention at the time.

In any case, the crabs were busy waging their tiny battles against each other for control of their burrows, waving their claws at each other to determine who had the largest and when that didn’t work, pushing against one another like tiny five appendaged sumo wrestlers.   When I’d walk by they quickly scurry into their designated burrow only to re-emerge and continue where they had left off when I had repaired to a suitably far distance, which often happened to be right smack in the middle of a different crowd of Fiddler Crabs.  However, I determined that by training by scope on the mud instead of at the horizon, I was able to get up close and personal without causing the whole crab nation to run for their burrow immediately.  It also allowed me to snap a few photos through the scope.

When I was about 7 or 8 years old, I convinced my parents to get me some Fiddler Crabs I’d seen at a pet store in the mall.  I took them home and proceeded to create what I thought was a realistic environment for them in a 10 gallon aquarium, complete with water pool and sand berm.  I have to say it was pretty cool, and I had imagined that the Crabs would do their crab thing scurrying along the water’s edge after bits of official Fiddler Crab food I would judiciously scatter thereabouts.  It turns out the habitat was a bit too naturalistic, because the first thing my pet crabs did was to construct burrows for each crab and spend 23.5 of every 24 hours in those burrows.  The 30 minutes they’d spend out of the sand was usually around 3:00 am, or so I figured, since the crab food was gone the next morning.  The moral of this story is that Fiddler Crabs make awful pets.

They are, however, pretty cool to watch in their regular environs and make even the slowest of beach afternoons a pleasant experience even if the birds are less than spectacular.

This graphical representation of the birds present is one of the coolest things about eBird.  Previously, graphs of abundance were the province of wildlife refuges and other publicly accessible birding locales. They obviously take a lot of time and a lot of work to do manually, but eBird’s software takes the burden off, allowing a regular birder such as myself the means to have this information at my disposal simply by entering my sightings on a regular basis.  Beyond that, it’s just cool to look at.  Feel free to click the picture to access the entire list.

There are some interesting things to take from the chart.  104 of the 105 species were seen by me (the missing bird was an Ovenbird seen by someone this spring.  Not surprising, but still one I expected to turn up myself).  6 species were seen every single week of the year: Red-bellied Woodpecker, Downy Woodpecker, Carolina Chickadee, Carolina Wren, Northern Cardinal and American Goldfinch, and 5 more that were seen 51 out of the 52 weeks (Brown-headed Nuthatch, Eastern Towhee, Tufted Titmouse, and Mourning Dove).  If I had to pick 11 species to be my most constant, those would have probably been the ones.

There were some surprises, like the flyover Great Egret late last summer and the Merlin this spring, and the thrush bonanza that added Swainson’s and Gray-cheeked on a single fall morning following a strong weather system.  I managed 22 species of warbler over the year, from common Yellow-rumps and Pines to one-day wonders like Worm-eating and Blue-winged and several other notable migrants like Orioles, Grosbeaks, and Buntings.

As expected, the wetlands provided a fair bit of variety.  Great Blue Heron and Belted Kingfisher were evident most weeks, though absent during the late spring and early summer when I presume they were breeding elsewhere.  A pair of Pied-billed Grebes made the fall exciting and Hooded Mergansers were present nearly the entire winter except for the weeks when the wetland was iced over.  Canada Geese attempted to nest again and Wood Duck was a rare visitor that I half expected to show up more often.  Maybe next year.

The museum site may be fairly pedestrian when compared to other similar places in the triangle as far as potential for a wide variety of species, but it is a great indication of what you could expect during a regular year in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Working towards its completion has encouraged me to get out more often then I might otherwise.  Now that every week is accounted for I can afford to be less anal about it, but there are still some gaps that need to be filled and more data is always better.

I do work there after all, it’s not as if I’ll lack opportunities.

Of the five subspecies of Brown Pelican that can be found on coastal environments all up and down the North and South American continents, the one most familiar to birders on the east coast is Pelcanus occidentalis carolinensis, the eastern Brown Pelican, which nests along the Gulf coast, around Florida, and as far north as Maryland and is a common as a non-breeder north all the way to New York.  The subspecific name, carolinensis, refers to the very first specimen which came from Charleston harbor in South Carolina where they can still be found nesting in the barrier islands beyond the city.

There’s something inherently prehistoric about watching a Brown Pelican in flight.  Other birds may have larger wingspan, or strike a more dinosaurian pose when perched, but the Pelican, by virtue of it’s long, thin wings and massive bill necessitating that the head rest just-so on the front of the torso, that seems practically Pterodactylic.  There’s no bird alive that so resembles those massive flying lizards, specifically the genus Pteranodon.  And it’s not much of a leap when watching a lazy flock of Pelicans slowly cruising down the beach to imagine they’re flying again.

There’s a good reason for that of course.  Natural selection, which slowly and inexorably drives species to fill certain niches.  This one, filled prehistorically by Pteranodon and currently by Brown Pelicans, involves taking advantage of the bounties of the sea.  A massive bill holds many fish and squid and long, narrow wings find thermals that exist just inches above the ocean’s surface.  A Brown Pelican can travel far on little energy, which is a clear advantage when you have an entire ocean in which to forage. And forage seems like such an imperfect word for watching a massive Pelican turn into the wind and drop from 40 feet up into the water with a spectacular splash, a sight even the least bird aware person in the world can appreciate.  But it wasn’t always that way.

Not more than 40 years ago, the Brown Pelican, specifically the eastern populations, were in big trouble.  North Carolina, which now has the largest nesting population of the species, was down to 75 breeding pairs.  That’s it.  Other states saw similar declines.  Louisiana had 11.  The entire state of Texas had 8.  The culprit was the same toxin that was doing a similar number on other large predatory birds, DDT, which causes the birds to lay eggs with shells so thin that the weight of a brooding bird was enough to crush them.  The situation was so dire that the Brown Pelican, the eastern subspecies as well as the Pacific californicus, was placed on the Endangered Species list in 1970 and efforts immediately taken to bring them back from the brink.  DDT was banned in the United States in 1972, and the Brown Pelican, as well as other affected species like Osprey and Bald Eagle, famously rebounded, a real deal success story.  Delisted in 1985, Brown Pelicans are once again thriving in their former range, a common sight along any coastline in the southeast United States including Wrightsville Beach in New Hanover County, North Carolina, where I found this small flock.

What images of soiled birds that have come out of the Deepwater Horizon clean-up effort have by and large been Brown Pelicans.  Because they’re so distinctive, so indicative of sunny days at the beach and lazy summer vacations, they’re an excellent way to relate the severity of the disaster to regular people.  Pelicans are proud and adept and just so big, and to see them reduced to a pathetic oil-soaked lump of feathers is wrenching in a very visceral way.   They’re not supposed to be like this.

But birds are remarkably good at recovering given the opportunity to do so.  There’s some solace, then, in the realization that Brown Pelicans have endured far worse.  They’ve been laid lower and returned.  Every Brown Pelican on every beach is a testimony to the power of  simply giving birds the time and space they need.

It’s inspiring really, at a time when we probably all could use a little inspiration.

Early, early that morning, my mother-in-law, my wife, and I snuck off to make the two hour drive that would put us there not long after the late winter sunrise.  We arrived to a bit of rain, but a wide open wildlife drive that was free of cars and allowed us looks at some of the loveliest wintering waterfowl you can imagine.  My wife is hardly much of a birder, but you’d have to be made of stone not to appreciate bays full of sleek Northern Pintails, dapper Redheads, and the odd Green-winged Teal and Shoveler.  A solitary Roseate Spoonbill was a real crowd-pleaser and a trip to a bridge where dozens of wintering Manatees congregated was a treat to those less bird-obsessed.

If you ever have an opportunity to do some birding in Florida, one of the most desirable species has to be the state’s lone endemic, a charismatic species that requires a very specific type of habitat.  There are better places to find Florida Scrub-Jays than Merritt Island, but we weren’t at those other places.  We were limited to the invitingly named Scrub Ridge Trail which helpfully has pictures of Scrub Jays at the trailhead to urge you forward to what may well be the most difficult place to find Scrub Jays outside of the metro Miami area.  For all the iconic images of Florida Scrub-Jays perched on top of visitor’s hats,  eating peanuts out of people’s hands, and otherwise making a mockery of the concept of “endangered species”, the birds at Merritt Island were not easily found.  In the end, we heard the distinctive call, turned to see a distant Jay atop a beachfront scrub, and barely lifted binoculars before it quickly disappeared, staying maddeningly out of sight.  I thought these birds were supposed to be simple.

In any case, this lifer was not supposed to be the exciting one on this trip.  Merritt Island was an appetizer and once we’d had our fill it was time to head to the main course, being served daily at a water treatment facility just outside of Melbourne.  The bird in question was a Masked Duck, a stunning neotropic vagrant, that had amazingly stuck around for several months since being discovered in the fall.  This was a bird that I had missed at least twice in Texas, one high on my most wanted list.  To have it so near to where I was going to be was too good and I’d been following it well before we left and every day leading up to Christmas Day, when I planned to get myself a fine ducky gift.  Long story short, we spent the better part of two hours combing the marsh for the bird until an afternoon thunderstorm chased us back home.  There were lots of other species of ducks, a fine assortment of waders, but no Masked Duck.  It was never seen that day, some thought it has finally vamoosed.  Until it put on a show two days later…

So it goes, Florida Scrub-Jay is a heck of a consolation gift though.

FLSCJA from wikipedia