I went to one of my favorite dragonfly spotting areas today, for the first time this year. I’d been mostly avoiding it for the past couple of years, thanks to a huge stormwater diversion project that effectively nuked the lakeshore. When I dropped by last year, I absolutely despaired of the area regaining any species diversity in the foreseeable future.
Well, I’m happy to report that things may not be as dire as I had feared. Not only were there more Odonata than I’ve seen in the past couple of years, the Snowy Egrets were back, and I photographed two shorebird species that were not present before: Spotted Sandpiper and Killdeer.
Neither one is a lifer for me, but they’re both firsts for that spot. Yay for recovering urban habitat!
At the end of an otherwise disappointing trip to a local wildlife reserve this weekend, I was walking back to the car park and was lucky enough to spot this Little Owl on the fence. It was just a few feet away, my closest ever sighting of this little-seen species, in fact it might as well be renamed the Little-seen Owl. Important lesson, keep concentrating right until the end.
I love it when the stars align and luck prevails and you get 3 different yet similar species in one photo. Western Cattle Egret, Little Blue Heron-juvenile and a Snowy Egret.
My first encounter with fledgling Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, the fledgling were making so much noise I was able to locate them by sound and capture this photo.
Last Thursday I did a scan of google maps to look for powerline cuts or any potential birding areas that hadn’t been visited before in the hopes of finding Indigo Buntings, a species that is scarce in the area and isn’t a frequently present breeder. Unfortunately I had no luck specifically on the buntings but I had an amazing morning out in the field regardless. The location I choose was an extensive patch of marsh and fire-maintained scrub which had access due to the extensive utility vehicle access roads. It was boarded by a almost completely abandoned road due the fact that it turned into a dead end leading to no where because the farthest end sunk under a depression of water. Instead of repairing or fixing the road they just built a new one slightly behind it. The old road created an amazing wildlife corridor where I stumbled on a surprising group of 5 recently fledged Florida Scrub-Jays! I took extensive habitat photos to document the new area.
I went to Bass Rock today and saw the largest colony of Northern Gannets!!! (this was like the coolest thing ever for me omg!)
Anyway I took 1000+ photos so here are some.
