Unusual day: June Challenge update

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

This morning Lloyd Davis reported the county’s second June record of Ring-billed Gull, “flying low over Post Office Pond.”

Right next door to Post Office Pond, John Martin photographed something I’ve never seen in 26 years of birding around Gainesville: Laughing Gulls hanging out in a parking lot: https://www.flickr.com/photos/74215662@N04/14226827908/

(John also got a photo of a King Rail chick at Paynes Prairie on the 7th. The picture’s a little fuzzy, but then so is the chick: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thermalin/14344885786/ )

The third unusual thing that happened this morning – and it will probably seem unusual to only one or two dozen people – is that, while surveying for the Breeding Bird Atlas this morning, I found a male Hooded Warbler singing near the western shore of Lake Alto. Lake Alto is in Waldo, among the pine flatwoods. All the other Hooded Warbler nesting areas that I know about are in deciduous woods up in the rolling, limestone landscape of the northwestern part of the county, at San Felasco Hammock, O’Leno State Park, and Mill Creek Preserve. I have a faint memory of finding them during nesting season around Gum Root Swamp in the 1990s, but I’m not sure about that.

Anyway, that’s three out-of-the-ordinary observations in one day. You June Challengers may want to check Post Office Pond and the Publix next door to it for those gulls.