Ancient looking Wood Storks, Boat-tailed Grackles and more at Clear Lakes Community Park

My next stop was the Eagle Lakes Community Park on the Tamiami Trail. According to BirdsEye I would find some interesting birds there and was not disappointed. The park was an ordinary looking suburban park with a large parking lot, ball courts and a children's play area, not very promising. At the parking lot I had run into a birder carrying a tripod and scope who told me  that there were three lakes. At the one that he had gone to he had only seen some Blue Jays that morning. So I was very surprised when walking past the ball court to the first lake I saw a very tame Wood Stork stand on the grass near the water.

The head appears to be all horned calluses and the neck thick knobbed leather, looking very ancient and out of place in our current Cenozoic (post dinosaur) era. There are no fossil records in N. America. The bill is used for probing for prey -mostly fish - in shallow waters, sometimes accompanied by foot stomping and wing flapping. I have no clue what's the advantage of the naked neck, perhaps as protection against sun, against insects? I could not find anything on it in my reading.

When you see the bird's somewhat lumbering flapping flight it is hard to imagine that it soars and rides the thermals at a height of  more than half a mile up to cover longer distances, which costs about one tenth the energy of flapping flight. 

Other birds at that site included a Great Egret

.... a Little Blue Heron

.
... a Glossy Ibis in non-breeding plumage

and an Anhinga in a fruit tree

On my way back to the parking lot I ran into a gaggle of Boat-tailed Grackles. These are sleek looking large birds that, when in  group, are almost constantly engaged in a loud chatter, an ever changing cacophony of screeches, jeebs, clucks, gurgles and rattles. With so many different sounds there must be a specific meaning to each.

Female Boat-tailed Grackle

Male Boat-tailed Grackle

An odd fact from  Cornell Lab's All About Birds: "The Boat-tailed Grackle has an odd mating system: harem defense polygyny. Females cluster their nests, and the males compete to defend the entire colony and mate there. The most dominant male gets most of the copulations in a system similar to that used by many deer. But all is not as simple as it seems. Although the dominant male may get up to 87% of the copulations at a colony, DNA fingerprinting shows that he actually sires only about 25% of the young in the colony. Most of the young are fathered by noncolony males away from the colonies."

To be continued....

White Ibises, Tricolored Herons and more at Tigertail Beach on Marco Island

I am still trying to catch my breath from our trip to SW Florida and sorting through hundreds of photos. We stayed in Naples and while my husband was busy preparing his parent's condo for sale, he graciously ceded our rental car to me for trips to the regional birding hotspots.

I arrived at Tigertail Beach on  Marco Island at low tide. The beach faces a tidal lagoon rimmed with mangrove where many wading birds were foraging for food   I took lots of photos but will have to be happy with showing at most two of each species. The light wasn't perfect as it came from the wrong side so that most birds ended up being back lit.

White Ibises resting near the beach

Tricolored Herons

These are very active birds; they hop and jump and twist in pursuit of their prey.

Reddish Egrets

Juvenile Snowy Egrets

A single Brown Pelican, of which many more later in subsequent posts.

An Osprey carrying food back to the nest

where its mate was waiting

I almost feel sorry for this Atlantic Needlefish, looking surprised at being so suddenly plucked from the ocean. Does it know where it's heading?

Well, enough for today. To be continued.......

Juncos around my feeder

It's foggy damp and winter-gray outside my window early this morning. Our resident flock of juncos has congregated around the feeder which I just filled. It was a tufted titmouse with its harsh "beepbeepbeep" that had called my attention to the empty feeder as I was having breakfast - so breakfast had to wait.

Aren't there small buds on the forsythe shoots - and doesn't the light yellow/green color hint of spring?

Pete Dunne in his book "Essential Field Guide Companion" describes the juncos has having an angry, almost sullen expression, if you look closely. I can't agree. Maybe they were just hungry.

Here's a close-up:

This one just filled its stomach and looks pretty content to me:

This Tufted Titmouse drilling down on a sunflower seed.

It looks like the sun will be coming out now. The sky shows patches of blue and the snow is turning from gray to  bluish white. Time to start the day's work....