The beach is back

I went to Palm Point this morning to see if Tropical Storm Hermine had blown anything onto Newnans Lake. The first thing I noticed was that the water level in the lake had dropped considerably over the past couple of months, exposing several yards of bare “beach” at the Point itself. This is good news, as it will give us a lot of room to set up our spotting scopes tomorrow morning after the storm has passed. Hermine is forecast to make landfall on the eastern Panhandle at a little after midnight. We’ll get a lot of rain tonight, and hopefully a lot of birds tomorrow. Be at Palm Point at first light if the weather permits, and in fact a visit later today might be worthwhile.

This morning, though, there wasn’t much to look at. A couple of Spotted Sandpipers chasing around, but no gulls or terns. What saved the morning was Eastern Kingbirds. I had commented to Mike Manetz a couple of weeks ago that I never see migrating flocks of kingbirds anymore. I used to see a few flocks every year in late August or early September, but in the past ten years I’d seen only two or three individual birds at a time. But not long after my arrival this morning I saw a flock of about 85 flying east high above the lake, and as I kept watching the birds kept coming, until I’d tallied 330 Eastern Kingbirds.

Patrick Brady joined me about halfway through the kingbird flight, but there wasn’t much else to see, and no one else showed up. So I gave Mike Manetz a call to see if he was somewhere more interesting. He was: along with Lloyd Davis, Matt O’Sullivan, and Frank and Irina Goodwin, he was standing on the observation platform at the end of the La Chua Trail looking at the American Golden-Plover and a selection of other shorebirds. Patrick had never seen an American Golden-Plover before, so we got in our cars, drove to La Chua, and hiked out to the observation platform. Patrick got his lifer, and we saw nine other shorebird species as well: Killdeer, Lesser Yellowlegs, and Stilt, Pectoral, Least, Semipalmated, Western, Solitary, and Spotted Sandpipers (Black-necked Stilts seem to have migrated out). There were four Roseate Spoonbills. A lot of swallows were flying around, mostly Barns but a handful of Banks and one Purple Martin. And Matt O’Sullivan showed us elderly fellows how it’s done by picking out the second-earliest American Bittern ever seen in Alachua County and the earliest Mallard, a drake loafing among 50 Mottled Ducks near Gator Point.

Anyway, if you can get away, and the weather’s not too bad, it might be worthwhile to be at “the beach” at Palm Point tomorrow morning, to see if Hermine blows in something exciting like a Magnificent Frigatebird, a jaeger, a flock of phalaropes, Sooty Terns, Cliff or Bank Swallows, or some miscellaneous coastal species.

(For you youngsters under 50, the subject line is an Elton John reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rig3tgyYiAM )