And two more birds: Glossy Ibis and Purple Gallinule. Here’s the Purple Gallinule.
And a catbird.
And a dancing heron.
A sunning Anhinga.
And that shadow in the trail up ahead.
It has teeth.
And I’m not going any farther down that trail today.
I forgot about the fog!
It has happened to us before here in Florida. We have the next day all planned, then we wake up totally socked in by fog. So I opened the hotel room drapes this morning and nothing. Totally blank. Not a hint of definition of anything outside. I took a closer look. I was looking at a wall outside my window. I had checked in in the dark last night and didn’t notice that my only view was the broadside of a wall. Nothing but diffuse indirect light could make it to the window.
No problem. The day went on as planned. I focused on big obvious birds in the swamps, like wood stork, limpkin, and purple gallinule. I didn’t get any of them, but I did pick up three warblers, pine, black-throated blue, and American redstart. I worked my way south to Homestead. Tomorrow I’ll go thrash about in the Everglades and see what I can scare up.
And just when you thought we were through with the trip map…
They have gators here in Florida too. (Except their gators are crocodiles.)
If you zoom in on the face, you can see teeth that point both up and down. That’s a crocodile. If you only see the teeth that point down, it’s an alligator.
Monday
Saw a palm warbler.
And a blue-headed parakeet.
Eight new birds altogether.
And some other stuff.
I know iguanas are not supposed to be here, it’s an invasive species, but they sure look cool.
Squirrels are okay though, right?
And flowers.
I thought it would be easy
We set a goal of seeing 500 bird species for 2019. With all that territory we were going to cover, how hard could it be? We returned home with 447 birds counted. Since then we’ve added three more: spragues pipit, lilac crowned parrot, and white fronted parrot. There are a few more birds in Texas we could chase, but there is no way to get another 50 birds from here.
The ABA (American Birding Association) lists all the 900+ species of birds (now that they’ve added Hawaii to their area it’s over 1,000) that have been recorded in North America. Some birds, like house sparrows or pigeons, are everywhere. They’re really easy to find. Other birds, like Black-vented Oriole, or Red-legged Honeycreeper, only occur sporadically and are much harder to add to the list. To help us sort through the difficulty, the ABA classifies all the birds in their area into six different categories: 1 and 2 being the easiest to find, 4 and 5 way less likely, and level 6 impossible, level 6 birds are probably all extinct. If we just see all the category 1 birds in North America though, all the easy birds, that almost gets us to 500. All we have to do is drive around and see all the easy birds everywhere, and a few of the ones that are slightly more difficult to find. Simple!
So what happened? What went wrong? Why are we only at 450 species for the year?
We missed a couple important habitats. Birding wasn’t really the focus for a lot of the year. We just drove where we wanted to go to do what we wanted to do. We didn’t drive down the West Coast south of Seattle to Southern California. We didn’t visit the east coast north or south of Long Island. If we really wanted a big year count, we’d have to plan our trips more around birding.
And so it comes to this: Admit defeat or make an heroic effort. Well, desperate times call for desperate measures! I’m in South Florida tonight, spending frequent flyer miles, hoping to do some damage to the year-bird list. Time to knock off a habitat we haven’t been to yet and see where that puts us!
We had no idea
We didn’t know why the Broncos were playing so terrible; why they kept losing. It finally dawned on me today. The reason. I had totally forgotten about the lucky Bronco Poncho!
Our team has been playing all season without the benefit of the South Texas Lucky Bronco Poncho. We were only thinking of ourselves when we decided to go off to Alaska all summer. We weren’t thinking about all the Bronco Fans about to be disappointed. We had no idea how many people we were affecting!
Rest assured, even if we don’t get to watch the next Bronco game here in South Texas because they keep broadcasting Cowboys and Texans games instead for some reason, the Bronco Poncho effect will be in full force for tomorrow’s game!