No great theme this week. Just a series of pictures from the last month or so, mostly from St Marks National Wildlife Refuge, a short distance south of Tallahassee. Most of these pictures are digiscoped. One adventure that I don’t have documented was our successful quest to find Sprague’s Pipits at the Apalachicola Airport. The pipit is a fairly rare grassland bird that breeds in the northern prairies and winters mostly in Texas and adjacent regions. The airport in Apalachicola (the place where air conditioning was invented) is known as an unusual eastern location where this bird regularly winters. The airport was very obliging. They gave us orange vests and a walkie talkie so we could venture across the runway safely. There were several pipits in the grassland around the runway. We got a lot of good, if distant views of them on the wing but never got a look at one on the ground. My first North American life bird in a while.
Below are some more mundane but more easily photographed birds.