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Susan B. Whiting's Martha's Vineyard Birding Blog

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Birding and relaxing at Fiesta Key, FL

An email from old Vineyard friend Anne  to say she and Benny were in Sarasota, FL and that Val would be joining them could we come over? Sure we would  even though the visit drew us from Stuart, FL before we went to Clewiston, FL.
Relying once again on recommendation  we booked what turned out to be a fabulous small R/V park right near the beach and within earshot of the Gulf of Mexico. The people in the park were like an extended family, they got together each evening for sunset on the beach and at the end of each month they had a potluck dinner to bid departing campers adieu.  Many of our New England friends suggested that R/Ving would put us in contact with red-necks but so far we had found this to be very far from the truth.
We set up our screen room next to the Bird Buggy and enjoyed a relaxing week including lunch with Anne, Benny and Val and a surprise luncheon with Becky, another Vineyard connection.
A  Carolina Wren  woke us up every morning and flock of Black Nandy Parakeets which came into the Australian Pines nearbly at dusk. We made a point of visiting and walking along Siesta Beach, touted as the best beach in the world, and found the Snowy Plovers (first cousin to our Piping Plovers) had just arrived to nest and rear their young.

Dinner by candle light in our screen room, candle holders by Phil Linquist


Sunset gathering, Siesta Key, FL





Snowy Plover, Siesta Beach, FL

Bird watching in a nice Florida, Martin County Park

We wanted to return to Stuart, Florida to relax in a place more to our liking and find it we did!  Phipps Park, one of Martin County's Parks was suggested by a Stuart resident. We made reservations sight unseen, being a litttle nervous after our first blind reservation, but were so impressed with Manatee Hammock, also a County Park near Cocoa, FL, that we hoped to do as well.  We did.  Phipps Park is next to the waterway and locks that run between Indian River and Lake Okeechobee. The R/V sites are located between the water way and mitigation ponds and as a result have a nice combination of habitats and, you guessed it decent birding.  We became friends with Joe, the Park supervisor. We brought Audubon of Martin County over to do a morning of bird watching and suggested that they erect Wood Duck boxes in the mitigation ponds. Joe was pleased and asked us to put together a list of the birds we saw in Phipps Park while we were there.  Our total was fifty seven species, our favorites being a Barred Owl and Common Nighthawk.
We stayed at Phipps until we moved to Clewiston, FL to co-lead our final Audubon of Martin County birding trip to Devil's Garden and Lake Okeechobee, but returned after this trip and stayed until we migrated to the west coast of Florida for more birding and visiting Vineyard friends.

Our screened in room/tent we found to be essential to give us much needed extra space.

Phipps Park, Site 15-Bird Buggy with extra room.
Phipps Park, Site 33


Barred Owl, Stuart, Florida

Birding in Brazil and the Florida Panhandle

Our blogs have been few and far between. Our apologies- we are slowly getting used to life in an R/V and finding places to stay which are near good bird watching areas.  We made a date six months ago to join Flip's brother Brian and wife Martha  for a bird watching trip  to the Atlantic Rainforest in the Brazilian State of Sao Paulo. We parked our R/V with friends Joe and Linda and left for Brazil on March 16 and returned April 1. Instead of rewriting our Brazil trip please go online to the Vineyard Gazette and read the Bird News column of Friday, April 6, 2012 :  http://www.mvgazette.com/article.php?34604
We reprovisioned when we returned to Stuart, had a great reunion party with old friends and then bid our Stuart aquaintences a fond farwell and headed off to the Panhandle of Florida, know as the forgotten Coast.




Ferriguginous Antbird, by Adam Riley of Rockjumper Tours.

http://www.rockjumperbirding.com



Saffron Toucanet, by Flip Harrington

Audubon of Martin County,co-leading a trip to Merritt Island.

A year ago we  promised Audubon of Martin County's field trip coordinator that we would co-lead a trip to the Viera Wetlands in Melbourne, Florida 
http://ww3.brevardcounty.us/environmental_management/VieraWetlands-Home.cfm and the Merritt Island National Wildlife Reserve  http://www.fws.gov/merrittisland/
 in Titusville area in mid-February. We were definitely ready to move to a new location! No more concrete jungle thank you! We were glad to return to Titusville this time with the Bird Buggy in good working condition.
 We arrived at Viera, now called  Ritch Grissom Memorial Wetlands at Viera, and divided into two groups. It was great fun to be with the old Stuart, FL  birding buddies.
A couple of hours was enough as the temperature was rising.  We enjoyed seeing Crested Caracara and Mottled Duck (which replaces Black Duck in FL). to name a couple.  We settled into a R/V campground I found on line that looked good.. Manatee Hammock near Cocoa, FL turned out to be convenient to both birding sites.The campground had trees, birds, squirrels and fun people in tents, small, medium and large campers. The couple next to us had a Pleasure Way R/V. . Theirs was newer and wider than ours.She liked our larger refrigerator, we liked their camper's wider body.
In the evening we joined the Audubon group at the Dixie Crossroads restaurant for a great meal of rock shrimp.

Crested Caracara

Mottled Duck

R/Ving and Birding Not a Simple as We Thought!

We figured we could just drive away from the Northeast, head to good birding areas and just stop at a campground or a R/V resort for a night or so.  Not so.  It seems most of the campgrounds are booked between six months and a year in advance!  So instead of writing blogs daily, I am on the net finding places to stay. Now that is interesting and a challenge, but I would rather be birding and tell folks about where we are and what we have seen.
The Bird Buggy up and running, our first reservation was in Jensen Beach, FL at a place called Nettles Island which looked good online.  It is located on a peninsular in the Indian River.  Unfortunately it turned out to be a concrete jungle of double wides, huge R/V and concrete houses.  I think we were the smallest R/V in the the whole complex.  The saving grace was that it was walking distance to the ocean beach  and on the way we passed a lagoon surrounded by mangroves that gave us a chance to do a bit of bird watching. 
We were right on the water and so we could watch the Brown Pelicans feeding and the Royal and Foster's Terns  as they cruised by but the other three sides gave us
claustrophobia!
We should have figured we were in for a place less than choice when the first bird we spotted upon arrival was a Magnificent Frigatebird.
One day during our two week stint it blew a gale and the next morning we walked the beach and counted large numbers of immature Northern Gannets offshore.  The next day it was calm and not a gannet was seen.

A Birding Respite from the Bird Buggy Repair Garage.

Florida has an excellent Bird Trail, known as The Great Florida Birding and Wildlife Trail which covers parts of the whole state from the Panhandle to the Keys.  We rented a car while the Bird Buggy was waiting for a part and set off to the Orlando Wetlands in Christmas, Florida, which is one of the sites of the Birding Trail.  Our timing was impeccable as the  park opened that day.It had been closed for a month as per request of the family that gave the property so they and their friends could use the property during hunting season.There had been very little hunting  activity and as a result the birds had not been stirred up.  We checked in and saw that  Vermillion Flycatchers had been seen earlier in the day.  Trying to determine which route would be the fastest to this "electric" flycatcher was the next chore. Luckily two volunteers from the Park arrived  in a golf cart and suggested we jump onboard and they would take us to the flycatcher. Needless to say, off we rode. We saw not one but two male Vermillion Flycatchers and on the walk back we spotted around 33 species including Anhinga, Purple Gallinule and Limpkin in the short two hours we had. This is the time we wished we had the cameras cousin Sarah Mayhew and friend Lanny McDowell have. The Vermillion Flycatcher to to far away for our "point and shoot" cameras.
Female Anhinga or Snake Bird

 Purple Gallinule

Injuried Bird Buggy Repaired!

We used to be nervous when one of our vessels was hauled and lifted by straps on a travelift and then set down on blocks. But seeing our Bird Buggy ignobly hauled  by cable onto a roll on town truck was nerve racking.  The Bird Buggy was chained onto the truck bed front and back. If we though putting the R/V on the truck was hard to take following the tow truck in our rented car and watching it bounce around and lean as the tow truck took corners was gut wrenching!


We made it to Freightliner in Apopka after making a wrong turn and seeing the seedy side of Apopka. We waited for almost four hours before a mechanic could check out the Bird Buggy.  He came, hoping by moving a few solenoids and fuses, that he could get us back on the road immediately.  No such luck.  Next a computer was hooked up to some place under the steering wheel of the Bird Buggy.The computer took its sweet time analyzing the problem. The results was a failed immobilizer.  Was there one in stock?  Of course not, so for three days we camped  out in the Bird Buggy in a Freightliner garage waiting for the part to arrive.  Not much different than being in a shipyard!
The bird watching was definitely limited, although we woke one morning to the cries of Sandhill Cranes much to our amazement.  Other birds in the area consisted House Sparrows, Eurasian Collared and Mourning Doves and American Crows.


Our good friend and neighbor Larry suggested that my next book be entitled "Birding American Truckstops".
We did have a nice respite with cousin Dan Whiting who lives a half hour from Apopka. He provided us with nice clean showers and we dined at a fabulous Thai  restaurant nearby.
Thanks to Preston, the Sprinter mechanic at Freightliner, we finally were underway with the hopes ,as our friend and fellow birder Hal suggested, that the "road is smooth and the exhaust is at your back."

Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival and more

Instead of rehashing a previous article aboout our fabulous week at the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival I will suggest you read my Bird News column in the Vineyard Gazette  which covers our time in Titusville as well as the bird news on the Vineyard. Please go to:  http://www.mvgazette.com/article.php?33820

The photograph was provided by Lanny McDowell and was taken in 2006 at Stan and Marie Mercier's home in Chilmark. A good photo of Gary's Yellow-throated Warbler was unavailable.


Photograph by Lanny McDowell his website is:    http://ottgallerymv.com

Jeff Gordon the president of the American Birding Association interviewed Richard Crosslely and the interview gave a good synopsis of his keynote speech at the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival that we enjoyed so much.
http://blog.aba.org/2012/02/video-richard-crossley-on-making-birding-bigger-in-america.html

Pelagic Trip cancelled, Bird Buggy readied for repairs.

Due to inclement weather conditions the Pelagic Trip scheduled for the last day of the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival was cancelled. Flip and I returned to Black Point Drive in the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge to enjoy the myriads of waterfowl, American Avocets, Pied Billed Grebes, and probably the largest number of American 
Coots we had ever seen! 

 
 Coot "city"!

Roseate Spoonbills are almost a guaranteed species on this drive and we were not disappointed. 
The most outstanding sighting was watching five Reddish Egrets all hunting together in one pond beyond the A. Coots.


One of the five Reddish Egret seen on Black Point Drive.

Knowing that the Bird Buggy was to be loaded on a flatbed and shipped to Apopka, FL to a Freightliner garage the next day, we spent the remainder of the day figuring out how to stow the contents of the R/V so it would not be in shambles when we arrived in Apopka.

Bird Buggy is not perfect-bummer!

We pulled into the office of the KOA Campground in Mims, Florida to check in and be given our slip, oops I mean, site number.  The check-in process completed, we climbed into the Bird Buggy and Flip tried to start her.  Nothing.  He tried my fob (the name for the fancy new keys with batteries). Nothing.  Up with the hood, we found a neighbor with a truck and tried to jump the Bird Buggy.  Nothing. Now a couple of panic calls, one to Pleasure Way (the manufacturer of our Bird Buggy) and the other to Cousin Dan. Both suggested changing the batteries in the fob-still nothing.  Next we were towed to our site, Soo went to get a rental car so we could attend the Space Coast and Birding Festival next door in Titusville.  Flip called Good Sam's emergency towing service and arranged for a tow from Mims to Apopka, FL., which was the closest dealer he could find who had a computer that could determine the cause of our problem and allow us to stay in our R/V during repairs.  Flip arranged for this tow to occur just after the end of the Space Coast Festival.
We settled in and thought we could enjoy the Festival and not worry; not entirely the case however. Visitors before us had fed the reddish Gray Squirrels and as a result the squirrels were forever trying to get into the R/V!   En guard! And we thought we had trouble with squirrels at our feeders  at home!






The next few days were fantastic attending the Festival and catching up with old birding buddies, learning new ID tricks and seeing the new birding gear.

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  1. jane gavin on Off on another tack!
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