Last week Kestrel wrote a very popular Dawn Chorus about yard birds and asked “What kind of birds do you see in your yard?” I’m going to shamelessly pirate her idea and modify it a bit but asking you about birding a bit further afield.
Do you have a favorite spot (now or in the past) to go birding? What is special about it? What birds do you go there to find? What birds have you seen there that surprised you?
I’m going to talk about two places, one current and one from the relatively distant past.
Short Hills Provincial Park, Ontario Canada. This was the place I became a birder. I had always loved animals since childhood but birds had been the group of animals in which I had the least interest. I’m not exactly sure why but I think not being able to catch them was a big part of it as a child. In the summer of 1983 I got a job as an undergraduate research assistant working on a meadowlark field project. It was the first time I was around serious birders and I saw how many birds were out there to be seen, especially if you were out there 8 hours a day, six days a week. The field site was an area known as Short Hills, which became a provincial park shortly after my time there. Just to the west of my home town of St Catharines, it was an area where the Niagara Escarpment, rather than being a discrete, fairly steep, rise, is broken up into a series of small hills and valleys. The area was, at the time, a mixture of abandoned farmland (excellent meadowlark habitat), woods, and streams.
Among the birds that captivated my interest were northern Mockingbirds. We were at the very northern edge of their range and I hadn’t seen them elsewhere. My absolute favorites were the bobolinks. They were abundant in the fields and I have rarely seen them since then. That spring and summer I did see three species, Upland Sandpiper, Black-billed Cuckoo, and Blackpoll Warbler, once each and I have never seen them again. Another, Orchard Oriole, I didn’t see again for over 20 years.
St Marks National Wildlife Refuge, Florida. St Marks stretches along the gulf coast south of Tallahassee. It encompasses the westernmost part of what is known as the ‘Nature Coast’ of the big bend region of Florida. The coastline in this area is almost all salt marsh and has very limited development, in stark contrast to the rest of Florida. St Marks does have some habitat modification, but the modification is designed to increase waterfowl habitat. A series of low dikes create large ‘ponds’. The water level in these ponds can be controlled depending on what the managers consider desirable. The ponds can be fresh or salt water, open or marshy, or mostly mudflat.
In the summer St Marks is hit or miss. It can be sweltering and full of mosquitoes and no-see-ums without any birds or other larger animals to be seen. Sometimes you see cool stuff like Purple Gallinules or Least Bitterns, or Black Skimmers or dolphins feeding in the shallows. From fall through spring shorebirds can be seen in numbers. In the winter it is full of waterfowl. The open habitat with scattered trees attracts western birds like Vermillion and Scissor-tailed Flycatchers. I’ve seen the first of those two several times but have not been lucky enough to see the latter yet.
Anyway those are two of my favorite birding sites, past and present. We’d love to hear about yours and anything else related to birds.