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| Brown Pelican |
We arrived in Florida mid-afternoon and immediately started seeing birds--along most of the highways running from the airport to the Sanibel Island are drainage ditches and during the 40 minute drive I saw 4 species of wading birds and on the causeway from the mainland all sorts of sea birds, but the official counting didn't start until we were on the island and checked into the very comfortable Song of the Sea Hotel. From our room it was a 2 minute walk to the beach and the Gulf of Mexico. Our feet had barely touched the sand before we saw flocks of birds circling overhead. In among the
Ospreys and
Brown Pelicans were at least 10
Magnificent Frigatebirds and they were--magnificent that is--especially later when they flew down over the water harassing terns and gulls for whatever morsels those birds happened to have.
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Black-bellied Plover
Photo: Shari Zirlin |
Along the gently lapping water ran a large flock of
Sanderlings and along the beach you could find a few
Willets ignoring the pedestrians plus a couple of
Black-bellied Plovers standing on the beach.
The birds that really don't seem to mind all the foot traffic are the gulls and terns and it was among those birds that I was searching for one of my target species. I saw a
Forster's Tern fly by and a few
Royal Terns, but it wasn't until I approached a a large mixed flock of gulls and terns that I saw Sandwich Terns. I probably overlooked them at first as they associated closely with the Royal Terns.
< Royal Terns have bad haircuts.
< Sandwich Tern: Look at the tip of beak glow!
The size difference is pronounced.
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| Bottom 4 photos: Shari Zirlin |
This young Royal Tern hadn't figured out that its begging days are over.
What
is the Song of the Sea, you wonder? That day it was provided by the SOS Gull &Tern Choir as conducted by Shari Zirlin:
2 hours lolling on the beach in the late afternoon yielded 13 species in all:
Magnificent Frigatebird 10
Double-crested Cormorant 5
Brown Pelican 20
Osprey 2
Black-bellied Plover 2
Willet 5
Sanderling 100
Laughing Gull 150
Ring-billed Gull 100
Forster's Tern 1
Royal Tern 50
Sandwich Tern 20
Palm Warbler 1
The birds that really don't seem to mind all the foot traffic are the gulls and terns and it was among those birds that I was searching for one of my target species. I saw a Forster's Tern fly by and a few Royal Terns, but it wasn't until I approached a a large mixed flock of gulls and terns that I saw Sandwich Terns. I probably overlooked them at first as they associated closely with the Royal Terns.
Sounds like fun to me.
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