Ciblek Mania

In January 2010 I took daughter Phoebe to Florida for The Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival. We did a number of speaking gigs at the festival and at local schools. It was really cool to see Phoebe interacting with kids her age from the Florida schools, showing them, without a doubt, that birding is not just for nerds.

It was a highlight of my years as a Dad to be able to show Phoebe her life alligator, armadillo, manatee, bobcat, and a score of birds, including the endangered Florida scrub-jay. But there was one Florida lifer that eluded us: the giant roadside attraction.

On Sunday, when the festival was over, we headed for the Orlando airport by a roundabout way. A giant alligator at a roadside attraction provided a perfect memento for Phoebe. We stopped, she got out, and we took a few photos with this big-as-a-tractor-trailer gator.

I love this image because it shows my little girl, who is no longer a little girl, in full "hurry up and take the photo, Daddy!" posture. What a gator! What a trip! And what a girl! We really need to do another daddy-daughter trip before fledges into the wide world on her own two wings.

While there I gave three talks and lead a couple of bird walks, one of which was on the Plum Orchard Trail behind Nature's Classroom. We had 30 or so folks along, including some keen young bird watchers, and the birding was fairly good, considering it was a hot, muggy afternoon. We had lots of red-eyed vireos, eastern kingbirds, a green heron, immature white ibis, little blue heron, tricolored heron, pine warbler, four woodpecker species, and a noisy flock of brown-headed nuthatches. But the most interesting sighting happened right at the end of the walk on the sandy pool of water behind Nature's Classroom.

As we returned on the loop trail, one of our group spotted two shorebirds out on the pool. We initially thought they were spotted sandpipers because there were lots of spotties around and because they were teetering their tails the way that spotted sandpiper often do. But as they came out of the vegetation and walked closer it was clear that they were the larger solitary sandpiper. And they were really behaving weirdly: running around excitedly, bobbing almost constantly, looking into the grass.

That was when the object of their attention slithered into view: a banded water snake came gliding toward the birds. The birds seemed to be conflicted about this: should they run or should they fight? As soon as the snake would head away from them, the solitaries would chase it. If the snake came toward them, they scampered away. Certainly the snake was too large for them to kill and eat, and I'm not sure that the snake could have subdued the sandpipers, so they were left to perform pantomime parries and thrusts with no actual attacks.

This was my first trip to St. Marks—one of our oldest national wildlife refuges. What a fantastic place it is! I'm certain I'll be back again for another visit.

It's been a wild few weeks here at Bill of the Birds international corporate headquarters. Apologies for the mostly unavoidable dead air here on the blog. So, as an attempt at making this up to my patient readers, here's a much-needed Moment of Bliss for you and me.

The image above was taken yesterday morning along the road to the St. Marks lighthouse. The air was cool and humid, with that whiff of brackish marsh. Birds dotted the sky as though the heavens spilled its pepper mill and I took a moment to feel my feet on the ground, to fill my lungs with sweet morning air, to count the glory rays striking skyward from the rising sun. It was so peaceful. Life at that moment, well, it was very good.

Then my camera battery ran out.

More soon.

His entry:

Loggerhead Shrike
Boat-tailed Grackle
Mourning Dove
Eurasian Collared-Dove

My Haiku:
Dove flies to the west
Dove circles the world in time
Dove that ate the south

Oggie wins a copy of my latest book Hummingbirds and Butterflies co-authored with Connie Toops and published by our friends at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

[Oggie, please see my contact info in the captions on the original post so we know where to send your fabulous prize.]

By the way, we got some great haikus with this contest. You can read them in the comments section of the original post.

Yes these birds are in silhouette (sorry) and yes they represent four separate (bird) species.

The first person who can correctly identify these four species AND write a separate (and proper) haiku about one of them, wins a copy of my new book Hummingbirds and Butterflies (which I wrote with co-author Connie Toops).

Deadline for entries is Saturday, April 16, 2011. May the best birder/poet emerge victorious!

So I am tucking these sightings away for the day when some enterprising ornithology student decides to do a study on these species for his/her PhD thesis. We're calling these species "Bankable Lifers" until they are countable.

I'm taking a bit of artistic license here in using the above image of an alligator to represent my daughter Phoebe's first encounter with one of these large aquatic, carnivorous reptiles. The actual photo of her life 'gator is the one below, which Ms. Phoebe digiscoped herself. [Special thanks to the eagle-eyed Lisa White, a native Florida cracker, who spotted this gator for us in a canal at Merritt Island NWR.]


It was not a very satisfying look at the first gator. It only had its head above water. After about three minutes, it removed even that small bit of itself, slowing sinking into the murky water. The three of us spent the rest of the morning driving around, certain we'd see another gator—perhaps one out on a bank soaking in the sun on this very cool Florida morning. But we were denied.

So we went to the beach.


Two days later Phoebe and I were headed back to the beach when we saw a turn off for Eco Pond Road. I'd remembered seeing and photographing a massive alligator on that road two years before, so we turned off for a side gator hunt. Just two miles later, I spotted our gator, lounging in the back of a lagoon, covered in duckweed. I told Phoebe to get out and stand on the bank in front of the gator (which was at least 60 feet away) so I could take her photo with her first look at a complete American alligator.
She agreed to pose for the photo, but could not help cringing when I raised the camera to my eye and said "Awesome! He's coming closer!"


After manatees, seeing an alligator was next on Phoebe's most-wanted list. The fact that we also added bobcat and armadillo was icing on the already rich and delicious cake.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my good friends at The Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival for inviting Phoebe and me down to Titusville, and for making us feel so welcome. It was an unforgettable experience for us and it reminded me how completely lucky I am to be a Dad.

Phoebe and I made a bunch of appearances at middle schools in north Brevard County near Titusville as part of the Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival. We were trying to encourage some of the students—all near Phoebe's age—to consider birding as a fun, cool thing to do. We gave a half-dozen talks and lead a half-dozen walks. And I believe we made a few new birders.

The talks all went really well (I am so proud of the Phoebster for taking to public speaking so easily) and so did most of the walks. After all, it's hard not to see lots of birds in January in Florida. But it happens...

One of the schools we visited had a fairly bad bird walk due to an almost complete lack of birds. Oh sure we had some distant pepper specks int he sky (vultures) and some flyover American robins plus a few returning purple martins, but other than that we struck out. And I gotta tell you that I can keep any group of kids interested and under control as long as there are birds to show them. Preferably perched birds that we can get the spotting scope on. Even the rowdiest bully (of which we encountered none at the schools we visited) will go "Wow! That's AWEsome!" when shown a zoomed-in look at a northern mockingbird or any other species for that matter.


But at this school it was the doldrums of the afternoon with an approaching storm and the birds were all taking a siesta. Consequently the kids were becoming restless. After all it was Friday afternoon and this was their last class of the week. One group of boys began showing off by reenacting scenes from a war movie or video game. Girls began gathering into small groups to chat about the boys. Only a few students stuck with Phoebe and me, asking questions about birds, the book, us. The teacher began to tire of trying to keep control. I sensed my grip on the class slipping away.

That's when Mother Nature stepped in to save us. Someone screamed "AHHHH! SNAKE!!" and we watched as a tiny brown snake with a pale orange and black pattern on its back slithered into the middle of a group of 8th graders.
The snake quickly realized it was surrounded, so it raced into the only dark hole it could find: inside the sole of a girl's tennis show. Lucky for the snake, which one young man shyly ID'd as a juvenile corn snake, the girl remained calm while we removed her shoe.


We all got a look at the snake curled up inside the open tread of the sole. The "Cool!" and "Sweet!" and "Awesome" comments drifted through the sultry afternoon air.
After everyone got a good look, I gently removed the snake and let it go in the grass.

We strolled back to the school, retrieved the loaner binoculars (many heartfelt thanks for the bins to Eagle Optics and The Enchanted Forest), answered a few final questions, and said our goodbyes. Phoebe and I signed a copy of "The Young Birder's Guide" for the school's library, and hit the road. I'll bet that book gets checked out a few times this spring.

We'd seen fewer than five bird species on this bird walk, but, thanks to a snake in the grass, it was still a big success.

As soon as we got off the plane at the Orlando airport and secured our rental car, Phoebe and I took off after her most-wanted Florida experience: seeing a manatee. I knew from previous experience that Blue Springs State Park was one of the best places to find these gentle aquatic mammals, so that's where we headed (after a quick nosh at Steak & Shake!).

Sure enough, as soon as we parked the car and walked down to the edge of spring-fed Blue Springs Run where it meets the St. John's River, Phoebe added West Indian manatee to her mammal life list.

The park is a designated manatee refuge and the park's name (Blue Springs) is the reason the manatees are here in the winter. Warm water from the springs heats the river and manatees need warm water to survive. The very cold weather of early January had been hard on the manatees in this part of Florida.

We walked the boardwalk for the next two hours, looking at manatees, spotting birds, marveling at live oaks draped in Spanish moss, and drinking in the warm Florida sunshine.

That morning when we left Ohio, it was snowing hard with three inches of snow on the ground, temperatures dropping. So, though Floridians on the boardwalk were bundled up and decrying the cold snap, 68ºF felt like beach weather to us.


Me: "We're not in Ohio anymore, Phoebster!"
Phoebe: "Yeah and if we were, I'd be in algebra class right now!"

Standing on the dune along the Cape Canaveral National Seashore, I watched a foraging Forster's tern working the water just beyond the breaking waves. It flew parallel to the beach, heading north into the wind, looking down at the water for the silver flicker of sunlight reflecting off fish scales.

Catching sight of just such a flash, it stops, planting one wingtip in the invisible air, then cartwheeling into a dive.


Down like a lead arrow, bill-first it plunges. Splash!


Springing up from one Earth element into another, the tern shakes itself, sending small jewels of wet back to the foam. Nothing small and silvery wriggles in its bill. Nothing to show for such mastery of air and water.


And the tern turns again into the wind, pumping forward on white wings dusted with gray.


I watch from the sand—earthbound—slack-jawed and stirred at the wonder of it all.

This afternoon, while frolicking on the beach at Cape Canaveral National Seashore with daughter Phoebe, I snapped off a few shots of the foraging ruddy turnstones. None of them was in breeding plumage, but then—I forget myself—it's January! They SHOULD be in winter plumage.

Not a whole lot of bird photography on this trip, at least not yet. Though, Phoebe got some nice shots for me of a loggerhead shrike at Viera. Here's one of them:

Daughter Phoebe and I have migrated south to Florida for a few days of giving birding talks at schools in and around Titusville as part of the Space Coast Birding and Nature Festival.

So we've traded icy flocks of ravenous starlings for....

.... white ibises against the sunset.

We'll report in soon about the talks, birds, sun, and surf. We hope you are warm and happy wherever you are.

Later this month I will be getting onto an airplane with my red-headed daughter Phoebe Linnea to go to Florida for a bit. We'll be participating in the Space Coast Birding Festival in Titusville, FL as speakers/trip leaders. Yes, that's right, Phoebe is launching her career as a birding festival performer and, knowing her as I do, I feel certain that she will surpass me (and perhaps her mom, eventually) within a a short while.


Getting to split from the frozen wonderland of southeastern Ohio for the less-frozen sand-and-seascape of Florida's east coast has made Phoebe a much happier youngster during our recent string of snow days.



Phoebe and I will be giving presentations at three different schools in the Titusville area, plus at the Space Coast Birding Festival itself. After each talk, we'll go outside for a bit of birding. The topic for our talks is kids and bird watching salted with some stories from our work on The Young Birder's Guide to Birds of Eastern North America.

Phoebe's class at Salem Liberty Elementary School spent half of fourth grade, all of fifth grade, and part of sixth grade helping me to create the Young Birder's Guide. We'll talk about how the book was created, how the kids liked it, and about some of the other cool things we discovered along the way.

One of our early appointments during the trip is in Celebration, Florida, where we'll do an interview at Radio Disney on a show hosted by two young gals who are about Phoebe's age. It will be neat to see what Phoebe thinks of this crossroads of pop culture, teen sensation, and mass media.
When I asked Phoebe last summer if she wanted to go to the festival with me in January, she immediately said "Yes!" Followed by "Wait! Will it be warm there?" When I confirmed that it was likely to be warmer there than in Ohio, she was all in.

Then I asked the inevitable question, since we'd be flying into Orlando:
"Phoebs, do you want to go to Disney World since we'll be right there?"

And she said immediately:
"NO! I want to see manatees!"

This ranks among my proudest moments as a parent.
Of course I also hope to show Phoebe some of Florida's sweet birds, like wood stork, roseate spoonbills, and egrets at Merritt Island, and the limpkins, anhingas, and rafts of ducks at Viera Wetlands. I expect she'll dig these feathered wonders even if it's not sunny and 75ºF the entire week.


I'm also looking forward to introducing my daughter to some of my friends from the birding festival circuit. She's already met many of them, but being the proud papa, I can't resist showing her off just a bit.

If you're planning to attend the Space Coast Birding Festival, please come to one of our public talks and walks on Saturday, January 30.

While spending a morning last week on the beach on Sanibel Island, Florida, I was seeing the usual shorebird suspects: willets, sanderlings, and a few ruddy turnstones. Then a flock of chunky birds dropped in, settling among a resting mixed flock of terns and gulls. My first pre-bins guess was dunlin, but when I got them in my binocs I noticed that they were bigger than dunlin, plumper looking, and lacked the dunlin's longer decurved bills. They settled down and immediately tucked their bills under their wings to rest. Could they be tired migrants?


These birds were in drab winter plumage, with uniformly gray-brown backs. They had a medium-length bill. A fair amount of scalloping was on the breast and flanks and the legs were dull yellow and relatively short. There was the hint of an eyebrow and a darkish cap.


This was adding up to be a pretty neat species. Finally the snoozing birds raised their heads and and I felt solid in identifying them as red knots. This is one of our most imperiled shorebird species. Red knots winter along the southern coasts of the U.S. We almost never see this species in Ohio.

I've seen red knots many times before—usually along the Delaware Bay where they stop in spring migration to feast on the bountiful eggs of horseshoe crabs. Nature in its infinite wisdom and perfect timing, aligned the nesting of horseshoe crabs, which come to shore to deposit their eggs by the millions in spring, with the passage of migrant shorebirds—especially the red knot. The knots fatten up on the tiny green eggs and put on fat necessary to fuel their remaining journey to the northernmost sliver of the North American continent to nest.

The fishing industry in the East has been over-harvesting horseshoe crabs to use as bait. The resulting reduction in nesting horseshoe crabs has drastically reduced the primary migration food source for the red knot. And this has affected the red knot population, which has dropped more than 50 percent since the 1980s.

It was a privilege to see this small flock of red knots, as yet unbanded, spending the winter here on this beautiful beach. I wished them well in their season of travel to come.