Greetings Dawn Chorusers! I hope no one else had plans for today. Yesterday we went down to coast southwest of Tallahassee to Bald Point State Park and Alligator Point. Lots of debris on the beach meaning a lot of stuff for beach combers to pick through including shorebirds.
Bald Point. This big mat of red algae of some kind was about as deep as the smaller birds were tall. As you can see (hopefully, the image isn’t that great) there were a huge number of sanderlings, dunlin, ruddy turnstones, and willets going to town.
Alligator Point is a public beach backed by private homes. It is used by people much more heavily than Bald Point. There was a smaller debris pile there that also attracted many birds. They were much more tolerant of people. The tide was coming at this point and the birds had to be alert to avoid waves (not that the waves on the gulf are all that large).