Miami November Report 1

Angry skies over Ft Lauderdale:


Sanderling:






Anhinga scream:


At a Gatorland show;


Seen during an Everglades airboat ride:


Belted Kingfisher:


Oh, hello! Egyptian Goose at Key Biscayne:


Apparently there are parts of Miami that are being overrun with peacocks. They were released from an old zoo in Key Biscayne and spread throughout the greater Miami area. It's not as amusing as it sounds - rather than sing, they make really grating noises (usually an hour before sunrise) and leave really large gifts on lawns and walkways...


Great Blue Heron:


Young Double-Crested Cormorant:


Wintering Palm Warbler, trying to hide:

Shorebird fight

These little birds fly 14,000 miles every year from their wintering grounds in Brazil and Surinam to the breeding grounds in the Arctic - sometimes all the way west in Alaska. On their way south, they stop by our area around mid-August. They are Semipalmated Sandpipers, and they are among the most numerous shorebirds in the world (although their population is 70% below their historical normals).

I took these pictures in Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge this last summer:

Check out the moth flying out - through the water - from under the bird on the left while they are fighting

 

 

Bonus picture: common tern with its catch:

 

Miami sunrise

August sunrise in Miami:













BTW, here's a ponderable: are sunrises in Miami earlier or later than they are in New York? Hint: it depends.

Three picture stories

Some pictures are just snapshots of fleeting moments in time. Some either come or remind you of stories. Here are three of them.

Story #1: The most improbable New York immigrants
If you've seen them, you must've been very shocked to find this bird chirping airily on a brisk January morning in New York:



Some call them Quaker Parrots, but the real name is Monk Parakeet. They are originally from South America, from an area with the same climate as New York, so they feel very much at home here. As a matter of fact, they've been in New York for 40 or 50 years already.



Some urban myths credit their spread to a broken crate at the JFK airport. From there, they've spread to Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and now to north New Jersey. But there are actually colonies of them in Chicago and even some European cities. So it's more likely that their northern population originated with just escapees from captivity - they were very popular as pets in 1970s apparently.



This guy is from Bergen County, NJ - I took these pictures in a local park on Thanksgiving morning.







Story #2: Sanderling migration
If you've ever been to a northern beach in off-season, you would have seen flocks of them pecking their way at the water's edge. Sanderlings are small shorebirds, just 6-7 inches bill-to-tail. But they attempt some of the longest migrations ever. I took this shot on May 5th in Fort Lauderdale, FL:



Notice this Sanderling is banded! So I reported the sighting, and learned that this same bird was seen just two weeks later in New Jersey, not too far from where I live. It was banded in 2011 in Delaware, on the banks of Delaware Bay. In between its banding and my sighting, it was also seen wintering in South America! Quite a long trip for such a small creature.




Story #3: Falcon's dinner
Note: some of the pictures on the bottom are a little bit graphic. 

A friend and I went to look for owls in upstate New York recently. No luck, but on the way there we came across a small falcon, called Merlin, guarding something on a tree:



Merlins are the second-smallest falcon in US (the smallest being American Kestrel), but they are mostly bird-hunters. They are really acrobatic flyers - they actually catch most of their prey from below! This one seems to have caught a starling. We actually passed it before we realized what it was, and had to make a U-turn to take these pictures.