There were feeding birds of some sort almost wherever I stopped the car…

This third segment of my Florida birding sojourn involves parts of Merritt Island,  a refuge east of Titusville, south of Daytona and within eyesight of Cape Canaveral.

After driving up from Wakodahatchee, I got a place to stay, dumped some gear and made it out for a couple of late afternoon hours to  Merritt Island and chose one of the  more commonly used (and paved) driving tours you can take around the managed impoundments of the preserve.  Black Point I think it’s called.  I stopped in at the park headquarters and store to purchase the Bill Pranty guide to Florida birding.  The next morning at sunrise there was a thin layer of ice on the back window of my rental and I was eager to drive back to the island to run the less-travelled coral and dirt loops along the southern side of the preserve.  This drive included canals, a saltwater bayshore and mudflats… perfect habitats for swimming, diving and wading birds with convenient and frequent access for photographing birds.

Photo tip: on a typical day of shooting, when I actually spent a fair amount of time birding, as opposed to time spent getting to the birding, I was filling one and a half four gigabyte flash cards, taking bird photos in RAW and large Jpegs.  This represents about 450 shots.  I usually do not stop to edit along the way, meaning delete, because I don’t need to and don’t want to take the time.  The exception is when I fill up a card and do not have access to another card right then and there.  I try not to let this happen.

Near the beginning of the driving tour I found a string of resting Stilt Sandpipers, the only ones I saw on the entire trip.  Here’s a flock of winging dowitchers, long-billeds I imagine:

I noticed that some different species associate with ibises, following them around to see what gets stirred up – Pied-billed Grebes, snowies and Little Blue Herons.

Here are two whoppers, meaning I chose to display them, a Wilson’s Snipe and a female Belted Kingfisher, in a really large format, at least on my laptop.  Which do you think is better, to show bird photos that fit neatly into the frame of the blog or large ones like these two which put you closer to the bird, but which may induce you to use sliders up and down and side to side to see the entire image?

I have a list of folks who get an emailed notice from me with a URL to click on when I have posted a new blog.  There are times when I just send out photos to the list without bothering to blog about them or post them to a listserve.  Not on the list?  Want to be? Just contact me (below right) saying you want to be on the list or, better yet,  subscribe to Feedburner above, in the right side column for automatic blog feeds to your email.  Getting off the list is just as simple.

These images and more are available for purchase. Contact me or View store.

Birds are cool!  Lanny     

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Folks on Martha’s Vineyard care a lot about their Piping Plover summer residents and so do Floridians care about their Piping Plover winter residents.   Just before I headed down to Miami I was invited to go out on a small boat out of Stuart on the day after I arrived in Florida, under the guidance of the local Audubon Society, to take photographs of the  plovers that winter on tidal sandbars near mangrove islands in the estuary system that connects the Intracoastal Waterway and the jettied entrance to the Stuart harbor system and the Atlantic Ocean.  A few Piping Plovers had previously been observed and they numbered in the low teens.  Our job was to find them, count them; and my mission was to stalk them, find any that were wearing leg bands and document the bands with my photos to identify individual plovers.

Sometimes (usually) birders do look like birders.  Here are two of my hosts trying to figure out where all the shorebirds have gone.  An adult peregrine had cruised through and put up some flocks of Black-bellied Plovers and Dunlin, so we knew birds were around somewhere, just not exactly where.  It took a while to discover where the shorebirds were feeding – in the lee of a smallish treed island – when the wind could be described at the very least as blustery.

There were two birds that were banded: one with an aluminum band and another sporting three colored plastic bands.  I don’t have the word on exactly where each bird was banded, although someone said that one of the plovers there was from Michigan.  Michigan!  It’s so easy to think of Piping Plovers as coastal … our coastal!

Oops !  I had to take a shot at this ibis winging by over the flats.  It was my first day birding in Florida, so I was easily impressed by anything moving and feathered.

Gotta get some Zs sometime:

This is the fashion star.  He was also the most advanced of the group of nine plovers in terms of the onset of breeding plumage:

I have a list of folks who get an emailed notice from me with a URL to click on when I have posted a new blog.  There are times when I just send out photos to the list without bothering to blog about them or post them to a listserve.  Not on the list?  Want to be?  I will soon be asking folks who have joined this list to subscribe to Feedburner (on this Page), so that my blogs will go out automatically to the email addresses on the list as soon as I post them.  There will also be a treat for subscribing to the feed, a folder full of my avian art images which will turn into a screen saver for your computer when you download it.  Right now, this screen saver is in development and I anticipate it being ready about a month from now.

Just contact me (below right) saying you want to be on the list or, better yet,  subscribe to Feedburner above, in the right side column.  Getting off the list is just as simple.

Birds are cool!  Lanny     These images and more are available for purchase. Contact me or View store.Birds are cool!  Lanny     These images and more are available for purchase. Contact me or View store.

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