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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