The June Challenge – Day 5 update

From: Rex Rowan <rexrowan@gmail.com>
To: Alachua County birding report

This morning Anne Kendall found a Ring-billed Gull and five Laughing Gulls on the dock at Powers Park, putting the icing on a successful birding trip. She started at Longleaf Flatwoods Reserve at 6 a.m., finding a Common Nighthawk and then spotting a Chuck-will’s-widow, always a tough bird to see. She then went on to the River Styx bridge on County Road 346, where she found a Prothonotary Warbler and a Black-crowned Night-Heron. Her next stop was the Windsor boat ramp, where she saw a Limpkin and a pair of Wood Ducks. And then on to Powers Park and the Ring-billed Gull. All of this in about two and a half hours. I think this is the county’s second June record for Ring-billed Gull. Anne sent me a few photos, and I’ve posted two.

Mike Manetz emailed this morning to ask if I wanted to go to Palm Point and find out whether Lloyd Davis’s Tree Swallow was still hanging around. I did, of course, and met him there at 7:15. No Tree Swallow, but the way you bird Palm Point is to stand there and wait for something to fly by, so that’s what we did. After about an hour we noticed a couple small whitish birds flying along the far shore, past the Windsor boat ramp. So we performed The Newnans Lake Shuffle, the little dance in which birders on the west side of the lake move to the east side, while the birds on the east side move to the west side. We never did get a decent look at them, but Mike saw them dive into the water, so they were terns, probably Forster’s Terns. We also saw a duck preening on the water which we couldn’t quite agree on, probably a Lesser Scaup. We didn’t see Anne’s Limpkin, but we did see a dozen or so Laughing Gulls, 15 American White Pelicans, three half-grown Wild Turkeys, a Least Bittern flying past the outlet of the boat channel, and an adult Bald Eagle.

Howard Adams and Barbara Mollison walked La Chua this morning. Many of the birds seen on Saturday are still around, including Roseate Spoonbills and Blue-winged Teal.

Also this morning, Barbara Shea went looking for June Challenge birds at San Felasco Hammock’s Millhopper Road entrance. Across the street from the parking lot she turned right and continued straight, and managed to find an Acadian Flycatcher. There was a Hooded Warbler in there too, but she couldn’t get it to show itself. She had a nice consolation prize, an Eastern Diamondback.

A couple people wrote to tell me that they’d checked the Red Lobster Pond on the 3rd but hadn’t found the Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks. So if you’re still looking for those, Debbie Segal has seen them at the Hague Dairy, and Anne Kendall at Powers Park.

This weekend Judy Bryan found a very late Cedar Waxwing, a single bird, at the south end of Lake Lochloosa.

Ron Robinson had an American Redstart visit his west Gainesville property on the 1st and 2nd.

We had a few cameras on our June 1st field trip. We twice saw a Fish Crow, identified by call, flying with an egg in its bill, pursued by Red-winged Blackbirds. I assumed it was making repeated depredations on the same Red-wing nest. But Miguel Palaviccini’s wonderful photo shows that the egg in the crow’s bill is round and unmarked, not like a Red-wing’s egg at all, as well as being too big for a Red-wing, and reveals that the crow had found the nest of a turtle. Further down the trail, in the canal leading up to the observation platform, a young King Rail hopped out of the weeds and remained in the open long enough for everyone to get a good look. John Martin got a nice video.

Looking at John’s YouTube collection, I find this footage of a singing Yellow-breasted Chat taken at La Chua in late April, and I’m reminded that, although we missed chats on the 1st, Adam Zions found one along Sparrow Alley on the morning of the 2nd. Barbara Mollison also saw one this morning.

The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology is putting out a massively comprehensive collection of North American bird sounds which they’re calling “The Master Set” and selling for $49.99. A selection of these, merely huge rather than ginormous, is called “The Essential Set” and it currently goes for $12.99. Read all about it: http://earbirding.com/blog/archives/4458