 Okay, great. You are muted, but you can use the Q&A box at the bottom for questions, and I'll monitor that as we go along, and I may jump in if the question seems like it fits right with Ron's talking, or at the end, if you raise your hand, it's a little easier for me at the end. I can unmute you, and you could do it that way as well, or if you're more comfortable, you can certainly use the Q&A at the end as well. Without further ado, I will turn the evening over to Ron Davis. Good. Thank you very much, David. Can you all hear me? I hope. Sounds good. Okay, and I have spent a number of periods in the winter in northern Florida by choice avoiding southern Florida because of the crowds, and I find that it's one of the best birding areas in the United States for winter birding, and so I'd like to share my experiences with you, and first I'll start off by showing you where and when we did this. This shows the Florida Peninsula and the Florida Panhandle. Two of the areas were on the peninsula, the most southern, which is really closer to central Florida than northern, was at Merida Island National Wildlife Refuge and Canaveral National Seashore, and then the other Ocala National Forest near the small city of Ocala, and but most of what you're going to see was taken in the Panhandle area with an emphasis on St. Mark's National Wildlife Refuge, and in addition, we spent some time in Appalachicola National Forest and Tate's Hill State Forest and at a wonderful state park, St. George's Island. So you can see from this map that the most heavily developed part of Florida seems to be around the center, but actually the density of development is greatest in the south in the vicinity of Miami and the vicinity of Tampa and these other western cities, whereas up here in the Panhandle, although there are red areas, for example, in Tallahassee and Pensacola in the west, it's relatively unsettled and in terms of population density very much like the state of Maine, so it's a welcoming place. Of the roughly 300 species of extant native bird species not counting incidentals of northern Florida, on these trips I saw about 160 and have documented 125 of them with photos. Over half of the 300 birds are passerine birds, in other words perching like a sparrow, but my photos include more non-pastorin species because they're easy to photograph. They're easier because they are typically larger birds and less likely to be obscured by vegetation, a notable exception being some of the rails. The presentation tonight is first part of a two-part series, non-pastorin birds including vultures but not other raptors and it will go through the sandpipers and allies and then I'm reserving the gulls through pastorin birds for a possible other presentation in the future. The major bird habitats of the areas I was in are listed here but tonight we're going to deal primarily with birds of the asterisk or stard habitats, brackish and freshwater marsh, tidal marsh, riverine ecosystems, estuarine ecosystems, lakes and freshwater impoundments. Here are a few examples to show you what they look like. This is a freshwater marsh in St. Mark's National Wildlife Refuge. It may be slightly brackish at times and you can see that water controls actually created this marsh. It's artificial and the hint is given by the dead trees that were flooded when this took place. There were many more trees early on most of them are gone. So freshwater marsh, salt marshes which are very extensive compared to the state of Maine salt marshes and these of course are tidal but the tides are not nearly as great as we have here in the state of Maine. Then brackish lagoons that are intertidal or tidal ponds and this one is seen here at low tide and all the little white dots are birds of a wintering flock and they also feed in the mud at this lagoon. White sand beaches which are relatively sterile as far as birds go but they have some very interesting birds on them which I'll show you later. Many of the beaches in this part of the Florida and along the Gulf have pure white sand. Riverine habitats often bordered by, I'm having a, Cyprus. Thank you, my wife is standing behind me. I'm glad she ate my memory and lakes. This one is a puddle lake in Limestone which is a predominant rock type in northern Florida. Now the bird photos I'm going to show you all taken by me have some text on them and I'm not going to repeat all of that and so as we go along see the species it's either the top of the slide or the bottom of the slide mostly in most cases the bottom of the slide. The name of the species it's status in north Florida and for comparison so you can relate this to your own experience in Maine. I give the status of the same species in Maine and then the breeding range which is usually quite distant from northern Florida. So keep your eye out for that as the slides go along. I'm going to start with swimmers and then the next part of the talk will be waiters and so that's my own terminology and but ducks and grebes will be in the first two groups of birds that I'm going to show you and talk about. So the first group of ducks, some examples, there are many more than I can show in this talk are the dabbling ducks, the ones that tip up with their tail in the air and their head underwater. And so characteristic dabblers include the American whigen which is also called the bald pate because of its weight on the top of its head. This is a dabbler that's quite commonly seen in northern Florida in the winter. It eats mostly submerged vegetation and during the winter it also does a lot of upland grazing and in other parts of its winter range it will often feed in fallow or out of the season agricultural fields. Another dabbler is the northern pin tail. It's a bird of shallow wetlands where it feeds on seeds and aquatic plants and also invertebrates. Most of these ducks are omnivorous. Occasionally it makes shallow dives. The northern shoveler is readily seen in northern Florida in the winter. It is a very interesting duck because it has a bill that looks like a shovel and the bill is actually adapted for straining small invertebrates from the water. And to do this they hold their bill in the water as they swim and as they swim along they're actually filtering small invertebrates from the water. They will sometimes forage in groups and they'll swim in tight circles in a group to create a whirlpool effect to bring food to the surface. Another dabbler and a very common widespread one is the blue wing teal and it is a mainly a vegetarian particular on seeds. So those are some examples of dabblers in the north Florida area. There are many more. Now another major group of ducks is the divers and we'll start with an example the redhead. The word duck is not in its name. In its winter range it feeds largely on marine plants. So it's in saline environments for the most part including the rhizomes of those plants which it digs out with its bill. One of the interesting things about this bird is it's a facultative brood parasite and it often lays its eggs in the nests of other birds and gets the other bird to take care of its eggs. The common strategy among quite a few birds in disparate groups of the bird kingdom. Now the ring neck duck, ring neck duck maybe it should better be called the ring bill duck because it's almost impossible to see the ring in the field around its neck. The angular profile of the head is actually due to a short crest that it has and it prefers a rather shallow freshwater wetlands that have an abundance of aquatic plants. It feeds largely on seeds and below sediment plant parts. Its cinnamon neck ring is rarely seen in the field but you may see a small suggestion to it in the male bird on the left. This buffalo head both male and two females shown here is actually the smallest diving duck averaging only about 13 and a half inches in length. It's small enough so it's a cavity nester and it's small enough to fit in the holes of the northern flicker which it often uses for nesting. Unlike in its breeding range in winter this is primarily a saltwater duck of shallow bays and inlets where it feeds on crustaceans and mollusks. One last diving duck some people don't think of it as a duck at all is a maganser the red breasted maganser and this one is often seen at the coast. It's more often marine and estuarine than the common maganser. It feeds largely on small fish and crustaceans but also on a wide variety of other foods. One last duck and a very widespread one and a common one that all of us are familiar with is the wood duck and it doesn't seem to fit in either the dabbler or the diver category because it does a little bit of both. It's a very common bird of forest bordered rivers and streams and this one is shown along the Wakula River in the panhandle but it also lives in swamps and marshes. It nests and preform natural cavities it doesn't make its own cavity including pilliated woodpecker holes. It's an omnivore in both plant parts and aquatic and terrestrial invertebrates. Now just to summarize what I've said about these ducks there are nine species that I showed you and they're typical of the large majority of ducks that are winter residents in northern Florida. Only the wood duck nests in northern Florida the rest of them nest elsewhere so these are like so many of the winter visitors from Maine that go down to spend some time in Florida like myself. Their main place to reside is not Florida but they're there in the winter. Now in Maine about half of these 26 species of ducks that are found in northern Florida when they're in Maine they're migrants and very rare breeders. None of them are regular breeders with one or two exceptions like the wood duck. Only a few commonly nest in Maine as I've already said. More broadly these birds nest at wetlands and shores and forested northern US northward at boreal subarctic and arctic regions and some of them in the Great Plains of western United States. Now we'll look at a few other swimmer species that are not ducks and the first one I'd like to play some sound of. We'll give it a try here. Let's see what you think it is. So as some of you know that was a pie build grieve. It calls both on its winter grounds and on its breeding grounds for the north. It's the widest distribution of any grieve in North America and it commonly occurs in freshwater marshes, particularly well-vegetated ones and lakes particularly well-vegetated ones. It's an opportunistic predator on crustaceans and other invertebrates and small aquatic vertebrates like frogs. Most of its food is obtained by diving. It's a quite an aggressive bird especially when it's on its breeding territory. Now the next swimmer is often seen over northern Florida or at least I shouldn't say often but I've seen it on many occasions. Flying in huge flocks sometimes 100 200 300 birds in the same flock and even at a distance a great distance you can see them because they're such large birds. These are American white pelicans and characteristically they have black tips to the wings and you can see the long fish feeding beaks of the bird. Their feet are primarily on fish but very unlike the more familiar brown pelican it doesn't dive, plunge dive like the brown pelican. It simply swims along and dips its bill and scoops up the fish. It feeds in a variety of aquatic habitats and it also carries out cooperative foraging. Coordinated flocks of swimming birds encircle fish or drive them into the shallows where they become concentrated and can more easily be caught with synchronized bill dipping. Now although the brown pelican also shown in this photo is a very large bird and is four years long and with a wingspan of about two meters the white American white pelican is much larger. It's enormous. It's a body length averages 62 centimeters well over a half a meter and it has a wingspan of 2.5 to 3 meters so this is truly an enormous bird. So those were some examples of northern Florida's swimming birds that you can easily see if you visit that area. Now I'd like to show you some waders some of which can actually swim like some of the rails for example are good swimmers but they're primarily feed by waiting and so we'll start out with one of the more common groups of the bitterns herons and egrets and what I've done in this slide is I've double asked double starred the ones that are most common and those are the bitterns herons and egrets and the sandpipers and allies and others that are quite common are plovers and the groups of rails that includes the gallon eels and the the coots so I'll show you more of those than of some of the others. So here's the first group the bitterns herons and egrets and except for the bitterns the herons and egrets fly with a down curved neck very much like unlike the other long legged fairly sizable waders the the storks and the oh what's the other group help me out with that one oh okay well I'll think of it later sorry and so the first one of these birds that we're going to see makes a sound like this one this is a fairly common wintering bird in northern Florida and unlike many other waders it's fairly solid and of course cryptically colored and often hard to see and its method of foraging is actually quite interesting and differs for most other waders it forges by stealth rather than by chase it remains motionless for more long periods of time and in this way it captures passing prey by lunging at them and it's not detected by these passing prey and so they'll often just pass by right at the feet of the of the bittern and these include invertebrates and vertebrates and even mice it's most active around dawn and dusk and will actually feed at night as well when its unique call often can be heard another waiter is can barely be seen in this photograph along the Wakula river in your on your screen perhaps you see a little white dot right there that is a a great egret and it's sitting on at some vegetation which extends out to the shore from the shore it's a little bit closer here you can see the base of a bald cypress and lots of Spanish moss and we'll take a look a little bit closer now the great egret is a species that usually nests in trees but here we have an exception you can see it's sitting on a nest and some of the other tree nest is also occasionally will nest on the ground this species is the symbol of the national Audubon society Audubon and other conservation groups helped to bring it back from its population low in the western hemisphere in the early 20th century the population low was caused by over hunting mainly for plumes the great egret occurs in a wide range of wetlands from freshwater to marine where it feeds mainly on fish but also on other vertebrates and invertebrates now the bird that was on the title slide and in the publicity for this talk is the reddish egret which is a nationally threatened species it's a bird with a rather limited geographic range compared to most of the other species in this presentation it's rarest it's the rarest of the North American egrets and herons hunting nearly eliminated in the in by 1900 presently there are only about 7000 to 11000 adults it is a species of conservation concern throughout its range it frequents estuaries and coastal lagoons where it is often seen on shallow flats it's extremely active in pursuit of prey by running flying hopping footstirring wing flicking and other behaviors now here is a photo it's a little indistinct of a reddish egret about to start out on one of its feeding routines most of these routines are a variation of disturbing and chasing their prey when I took this photo the bird was about to begin a run with open wings the form of foraging behavior I was about to observe is called canopy feeding according to Leanne Couture and others in 1920 and I quote from them the individual runs forward with wings extended halts and peers into the water and brings both wings forward over its head forming a canopy a canopy overhead and overhead and neck this pose held for a few moments or even several minutes produces a shadow which presumably attracts fish and at least that's the hypothesis and it has quite a few other similar behaviors that are very active when it's feeding this is a snowy egret it is a bird of shallow estuarine sites and like reddish egret it displays a great variety of active feeding behaviors to capture small crustaceans and fish the species is known for its beautiful breeding plumage only part of which is displayed in this photo in the late 1800s its back plumes were sold for more than the price of gold on a weight basis since the hunting of plumes and result in population decline the species has completely recovered partly due to the activities of the Audubon Society another interesting heron is the little blue heron it occurs in smaller numbers even than the reddish egret it forges in a variety of freshwater estuary and seashore habitats where it eats mainly fish but also crustaceans frogs frogs and grasshoppers now here is a comparison of two birds that I showed you photos of the one on the left is a snowy egret the one on the right is a little blue heron in its juvenile plumage and at a distance it's very easy to confuse these two birds when you're trying to identify them but when you're up close you can see some of the details as you can in this photo so I was fortunate to get them standing side by side on a rotting log the one on the left has red as black legs with yellow feet or golden feet and it has a black bill with yellow at the base of the bill extending to the eye whereas the little the juvenile little blue heron on the right has very differently colored legs and feet and a partly light colored bill and lacks the bright yellow at the base of the bill so they're actually fairly easy to tell itself apart but at a distance they're very difficult now on one day we did some birding toward evening at a place that had that had a flooded wetland with some palm trees that had nesting birds at their top and in this case a a wood stark a wood stark and over here a great blue heron and so the sun was going down at first in an overcast behind an overcast or clouds so the lighting was very flat but even in january when this picture was taken they were nesting the great blue herons this one about to settle down on its eggs this bird is quite widespread and northern florida and common in the winter in both marine estuary and freshwater habitat so it's quite a generalist in terms of habitat it's a primarily a fish eater but also stalks uplands for rodents and other animals so on this january 28th at a wetland near orlando in this case this is one of the most southern places we were i obtained a series of photos of these nesting great blue herons between 6 53 and 7 29 p.m a shortly before the 8 p.m sunset uh at first the sun was obscured behind clouds producing flat lighting as in this photo of a bird settling down on its eggs then the clouds uh moved away from the setting sun and obtained the following photo when my wife saw this photo she said oh are these two different species and uh because the one below is much smaller than the one above but that's a bit of a not quite right because uh what's happened here to make the bird on top look so much bigger is that it has its necks its neck and its legs extended and its bird and its wings extended whereas the bird below has its neck folded and it's leaning down a little bit more but actually these two birds are almost the same size the tricolored heron a very colorful bird one of my favorites subsist almost entirely on a diet of marsh fishes and estuary fishes but typically uh an individual forages in isolation so unlike the other waders that i've shown you that sometimes will be foraging in groups this one is almost always by itself uh the populations of this beautiful species have been declining and it's considered a threatened species in florida but it's not nationally threatened so now i'm moving uh from the bay herons and egrets to the night herons uh to look at the two species that are present the uh i've seen this species the black crown night heron on multiple continents uh around the world it's the most widespread heron in the world uh it um roost by day and feeds mainly around dawn and at night uh and mostly on aquatic prey especially fish but it also eats a wide range of terrestrial organisms now one doesn't always get to photograph the adult of a species or photograph a bird under ideal conditions this species of night heron is most often encountered at wooded sites where lighting is poor and photography is difficult the species specializes in capturing and eating crabs and crayfish at uh forested wetlands including mangroves and other swamps and how did i tell this juvenile of the yellow crown night heaven from the very similar juvenile of the yellow crown uh night heaven well the way is to look at its grayer back has a grayer back it has less conspicuous white spots uh has a paler face uh it has a shorter and a stockier bill and the bill is dark gray rather than yellow and that's how to tell that the juvenile uh from the other night heron now there are some other um waiters and shorebirds that i saw in northern florida that are not in the egret or and heron group one of these uh is the glossy ivus this is the uh most widespread ivus in the world and it's present in many uh several continents and many areas it's a bird of inland wetlands and to a lesser extent coastal ones uh like many of the other shorebirds uh that feeds uh in the mud it's a tactile forager it probes the sediment and finds invertebrates on which it feeds it feels them out and that doesn't uh feed by sight uh typically uh the white ivus uh feeds flies and nests in large flocks and it's quite abundant in southeast united states wetlands both fresh water and estuarine uh in florida the species of special concern uh because of loss of habitat to development pollution and water management it's a juvenile stage of the white ivus is quite different in appearance usually brown above but it retains a pink bill and has pink legs not as striking as uh those of the adult iran you have a question that has to do with white birds and i thought i'd jump in here because of the white ivus you just showed um Dorothy gillman asked how did the how does the white plumage aid the juvenile little blue heron and then she goes on to say indeed what benefits uh is white plumage to any bird wow that's a uh a very good question that i don't know the answer to i guess uh it has something to do with the uh unique character of plumage color and its relation to mating but that's as close as i can get was it Dorothy who asked that question Dorothy gillman yes yeah i guess that i guess the thought may not to put words in her mouth but i guess thinking that white is such a conspicuous color making a bird stand out that uh what advantages there there might be to that but as you said uh it's maybe a bit of a mystery it is well there may be some answers and i'm gonna have to do some research on that afterwards but it could have something to do with uh recognizability by by mates or other members of the species uh but that's as close as i can get and that's very vague sorry Dorothy thanks for the question though now uh here we have a species the rosy eight spoonbill uh which is very near to its northern limit uh in northern florida and it occurs there only sporadically as is true of many birds at their limit uh but it's more regularly seen in southern florida uh like many such birds that are near their north northern range in florida northern end of their range uh they're very common in south america and uh this one uh fits that it is a very common south american bird it has a wide range of habitats and but it is a bird of special concern uh in florida uh because of loss of habitat to development uh in its shallow aquatic habitats it has an interesting way of feeding by tactile location in other words by feeling out its prey rather than visual recognition uh what it does is it swings the slightly open spoon of its bill side to side in a semi-circular motion in the water as it walks and when it contacts prey the bill snaps shut and it uh mainly on fish and aquatic invertebrates so like many of the waiters it's a tactile feeder uh these dirty birds uh woodstorks and they I often see them with their white plumage soil uh like this it's the only stork species in north america and uh and it's the largest waiting bird uh in north america uh it's about a a meter tall uh when its neck is extended uh in northern florida it's near the northern end of its range like the rosier spoon bill of its breeding range and the bulk of its range is in south america it too is a tactile feeder walking with submerged and partly open bill capturing aquatic organisms mainly fish it's a threatened species in the united states mainly because of loss of habitat due to water management now while i was looking at these birds a good part of the time uh there were black vultures overhead or in the distance very common sight much more so in florida northern florida than in may even southern may uh and uh but interestingly almost always uh the um the black vultures were accompanied by uh turkey vultures they were in uh mixed groups and uh while it's this particular vulture is almost entirely a carrion feeder uh performing a very useful function in clearing the land of carrion uh surprisingly it lacks a highly sensitive sense of smell so it often relies on the superior olfactory sense of the turkey vultures and by following them to carcasses they're able to displace the turkey vultures at the food and uh that's the way they make their living in large part note that they have a bare gray head the turkey vulture in flight has dark wing coverts and they contrast with the more silvery flight feathers behind them differentiating the front from the back of the wing to the observer below this contrast is not so great in this photo because of light coming from below rather than more typically from above a top illumination would brighten the translucent flight feathers heightening the contrast uh with the dark covert area uh so this two-tone wing is a very quick way of telling a turkey vulture from a black vulture note the bare red head sometimes it's too distant to see that another waiter which can be seen in northern florida but not very commonly is the limpkin which so-called because it gait resembles a limp its range approximately coincides very interesting and I think with its main food the pomacea apple snails if you look at the map of the range of the pomacea apple snail and it's almost the same as the range of the limpkin its bill is slightly asymmetric maybe you can see that and the lower bill has a shallow scoop that's just right for extracting the snail from its shell it also feeds on other snails and mussel species northern florida is close to the northern limit of its largely tropical range an important set of waiters are the rails and the very closely related in the same family gallinules and coots are really really a form of rail the first of which that i'll show you is the american coop you can see that not only does water shed from the back of the duck but it also sheds from the back of the coop as the little little water droplets on its back will show this is the most aquatic and widely distributed rail in north america it lives in a range of freshwater wetlands lakes and ponds and some coastal habitats also it's an excellent swimmer and diver but it spends a lot of time waiting as well it's almost entirely an herbivore and also feeds on land now the next bird i'll play its call or one of its calls a most common one and you can see if you can tell me what it is it's a rail a type of rail so here it is it's the common gallinule a very noisy bird it's about the size of a small duck and has long toes that make it easy for it to walk on floating vegetation it's also a good swimmer dabbler and diver and a very noisy critter as you just heard and it's very abundant in the winter in Florida at any weedy freshwater habitat as you approach the freshwater habitat you typically will hear this bird calling now it's relative more southern relative is the purple gallinule and it's probably one of the most colorful birds i have ever photographed and that's very similar behavior to the common gallinule walking either on the mud or on the surface vegetation with its long toes i'm going to play a song of the next rail and see if it seems familiar to you yes you're right that's the saura this is the most abundant and widely distributed north american rail in the winter in northern florida it is found in freshwater marshes ones that are tend to be dominated by emergent vegetation and it too like some of the other rails i showed you can walk on floating vegetation in this case on water lilies and its diet consists of both seeds and invertebrates now on many a day i would hear from the salt marshes this particular a call but i was never able to see the bird and i kept trying to find this bird but it seemed to be obscured in the marsh grasses so i kept going out early in the morning and several times before dawn to search for the bird and finally on a very foggy morning i found the clapper rail many of you may have seen it but i guess i wasn't as lucky as you are and now thanks to the magic of photoshop i was able to convert this photo to one that was clearer and look at the form of the rail with its wings outstretched and you'll see the same bird in the same picture after treatment with the photo the fog is gone this rail is as i've said more frequently heard than seen and it typically feeds deep within the salt marsh or the mangrove vegetation it feeds largely on crustaceans especially in fiddler crabs inserting sometimes it's inserting its bill into the burrow of the fiddler crab but also on a wide variety of other foods and crustaceans and in florida it's a hundred species you can actually get a license to hunt it you can see the color of the clapper a little bit better on a clear day than you can on a foggy day as shown in this picture so that's the end of the rails and then another interesting bird in north central florida around okala we would we had a vacation rental on a small lake in okala where we saw these birds flying feeding and they would be trumpeting it with their trumpet call that i'm going to play for you in a minute and i was having difficulty getting a decent photo of it but one day on my way to okala on a shopping trip i noticed us a nesting crane at a small roadside wetland and i returned before dawn the next day to obtain these pictures as the sun came up this bird sand hill crane belongs to a non migratory subspecies that's found only in florida and it lives there year-round doesn't migrate the usually it's found in a fairly open habitat like grasslands meadows and shallow wetlands and another interesting thing about the sand hill crane it is a social a long-term socially monogamous species and they the pair bond lasts for quite a few years and in the case of in this when they're nesting the pair takes turns at the nest and this i don't know if this is the bird that you just saw or it's mate this they look almost identical but they would call to each other as the their partner was approaching and and trumpeting to them the bird on the nest would also trumpet it was quite fascinating watching and listening to these birds now you may have to turn up your volume a little bit to hear this in a fairly quiet recording but this is the trumpeting sound that they make one moment now i'm going to move on to the plovers and i had never seen a kill deer in an environment like this one day we went boating out and visited at low tide a an oyster bed and believe it or not the kill deer was foraging in the oyster bed picking off little invertebrates as it went along and this is as some of you may know a bird mainly of open areas fields and other wetlands so this was an unusual sighting of the bird and that picture was difficult to get because the boat was rocking the black belly plover in winter plumage has no black belly the last time i had seen it before this sighting was at a tundra site near no molaska in uh in may where it had recently arrived i guess it was late may uh and i arrived to breed it's it's one of the most wide-ranging uh shore bird species and although it breeds on both dry and wet tundra in the arctic uh at its southern winter grounds it's largely a bird of marine shorelines where it feeds on marine worms small bivalves and a range of other invertebrates this photo was taken at a beautiful near white sand beach in glaring midday sun and you can see its shadow is almost directly under the bird like the similar piping plover the snowy plover is a species of great concern because it too is a ground nester especially in areas that are favored by humans for outdoor recreation and seaside property development it forages both in the intertidal on invertebrates and above the tide mainly on insects here's some other waiters the first of which uh is mainly a short bird of salt marshes the american oyster catcher which you could see in northern florida it can be seen on beaches sand bars clam flats oyster beds etc it feeds especially on bivalve mollusks and it has a laterally compressed bill flattened from side to side which uh facilitates the insertion of the bill into the partially open shells of bivalves this photo was taken just before sunset turning the white parts of the bird to gold it is the american avocet in its winter plumage where it lacks the orange-ish neck of the breeding plumage the striking long recurve bill of this bird is used for tactile feeding like so many of the other waiters on invertebrates invertebrates in the mud but it also takes prey in the water at their feet it is often found in florida in mangroves the last group of birds of this already long talk is the sandpipers and their allies and they're all in winter plumage so they look quite different than what they might look in main or farther north the short bill dowager why do they call it short bills because it actually has quite a long bill despite its name it's just that the bill is shorter than that of the long bill dowager uh this medium-sized shorebird is said to have a straight bill but to me it seems like many individuals have a slightly downturn bill what do you think um together with uh size and this long bill and its distinct pale eyebrow uh it's fairly easy to identify in florida it frequents mud flats and brackish lagoons whereas like so many other waiters it feeds largely on aquatic invertebrates the dunlin is a very abundant waiter uh it's a type of sandpiper and in winter it lacks the striking rufus back and black belly of its breeding plumage the tip of the bell is slightly down curved as you can see in this photo the dunlin occurs in huge flocks and uh sometimes these flocks number in the many thousands uh here is a a flock a flock in the many hundreds uh but not many thousands and a bit closer you could see the bird has very striking brownish gray back and uh striking white areas on both the wing and the tail an interesting bird to look at is the marble godwit which in this photo is accompanied by a group of dowagers they have a distinct long recurve bill the three of these birds of the three uh the two farthest to the right are females and the one closest to the left is a male and as you can see the male has a shorter bill uh than uh the female they probe for marine worms and small buy valves and take crabs from the surface using their very long bill the sandaling is the palest of sandpipers in winter has a lot of white and gray the tip of the bill is slightly spatula you could see it's expanded at the tip they frequent coastal beaches where sandy beaches that's the name sandaling where they display a rather interesting feeding behavior some of you may have seen the sandpipers running back and forth up and down the shore chasing receding waves down slow feeding on marine invertebrates at or under the the wet surface that the recede that the receding wave has exposed and then when the wave a wave comes in again they run back up the beach barely ahead uh of the wave uh never getting submerged by the by the waves uh the bird in this photo is walking on the wet surface that was just left by a wave uh searching for prey this bird uh is about to turn down slope as a wade recede receives the front of the wave is in white and the water is right shallow and this water is going to recede rather rapidly and the bird is going to run down slope and then um you see a bird uh that is picking up a food item as a wave is coming toward it and in just a moment it will pick this uh uh morsel up and race back up slope ahead of the incoming wave never getting hit by the wave very rapid movement now here's a bit of a puzzle uh a slight hint is that underneath the vent of the bird you can see some spots maybe you can see my pointer and but other than that uh it's uh nearly pure white on the bottom and brown or brown gray on the top and with yellow legs now this is the most widespread sandpiper in north american i'm sure you've all seen it because it teeters up and down in winter it doesn't look at all like what the name indicates it isn't spotted except for those few spots that i pointed out and um one of the keys uh to identifying the bird in addition to those few spots is that it has a breast area here which is dark it comes down it's it's a lateral breast patch uh patch and has light colored legs and um it also teeters in the winter time so that is a giveaway the species is found in almost all habitats near water and it has a correspondingly wide diet the next bird sounds like the following uh sound that i'm going to play um at it when it's at its breeding grounds let's give that a try you're right uh that was the winnowing sound of the wilson snipe and uh this bird is in the same family with the bird family a sandpiper so it's actually a type of sandpiper and in the winter time it is in a typical sandpiper habitat marshes both freshwater and but particularly in saline marshes near the seashore the sound the winnowing sound that you just heard is not a vocal sound it's made in the during the flying mating display of the bird by the flow of air over the spread tail feathers and those sounds off the tail feathers are modulated by the beating of the wings to make the winnowing sound uh and uh you can hear it quite commonly we hear it from our house around this time of year here in orno uh mean and in the winter it in florida it found in swamps and marshy wetlands and wet meadows like most of the other sandpipers it has a very sensitive bill tip with nerve endings that detect invertebrates in the in the mud so they are they're free just like the other sandpipers for the most part not entirely by tactile sensation rather than by sight one of the last birds we'll look at is was seen by me on the same oyster bed as the the picture I showed you of the kill deer earlier from a rocking boat and so it took a while I had a lot of blurred pictures to sort through it was foraging like like the kill deer among the oyster shells um this large bird is actually a curlew a type of curlew and in the winter it uh its habitat consists mainly of tidal flats and to a lesser extent a wide range of other shore and near shore habitats far the south including coral reefs and around where we were oyster beds uh now the next bird uh i'm gonna play and one of the last lat in fact the last birds in this talk is a pair of birds one of them what you were hearing uh was a greater yellow legs uh the an example of which is shown on the right side of this photo next to its congeneric partner the lesser yellow legs on the left it's very rare to see these two birds together and even rarer sense to get a photo of them together it's often difficult because they look very much alike although these birds certainly do look different to the eye but if you see them alone uh and the next time you see the other one they do look a lot very much alike uh and at a distance it's very hard to tell their size the greater averages around 14 inches long at 36 centimeters and lesser uh only about 10 and a half inches long or 27 centimeters uh the lesser has a similar call to the one i played of the greater uh yellow legs uh but it's a little bit more clipped and the notes are all in one pitch and um uh they feed uh like many of the other word is that weight is that i've shown you on invertebrates and fish and frogs and occasionally they'll eat berries and and seeds so that's pretty much wraps up and i'd like to summarize the uh sandpiper part of the talk where i showed you nine species and the question is these species typical of the 26 sandpipers that occur in northern florida and in the following respects they are quite similar all but one of the 26 are only winter residents in northern florida and that one is the one which i haven't shown you a picture of uh the large majority of the 26 uh have winter ranges that extend well into the tropics and even to the south temperate region and several of these birds are long distance migrants only a few of the uh 26 are known to breed in maine for example the wilson snipe the large majority of the 26 do not nest in the conterminus united states but do so in uh boreal subarctic and arctic regions so in conclusion um i should say that uh i'm really sold on birding in northern florida i think it's a great place for winter birding it's away from the cold in maine and away from the crowds of southern florida and only a few species uh that occur in uh south florida uh don't occur in northern florida almost all of them occur in northern florida as well on the left is a taste of part two which uh of this uh talk which uh there's no time for now um and those uh that part is the galls through the passerine birds and uh this taste is in the form of the very noisy carolina rent so that's uh the end of the talk and uh i'm happy to answer any questions you might have thank you thank you ron um a couple questions uh one if you recall the the photo of the oyster catcher molly williams asks uh uh noticed that there was a tag on there and she wondered who who was the research researcher organization the tags oyster catchers i don't know the answer to that um i saw several birds for example that had tags including the snowy plover but uh i didn't have contact with the birding community in the areas of florida where i was photographing so uh i just don't know the answer comment from dorthy gillman uh thank you for the great talk and the wonderful photos and i would underscore that as well the photos are incredible i always really enjoy how you frame your photos and the care that you take and uh i was i was really impressed by the the double the yellow legs that's a keeper for sure thank you dorthy let's see we've got um let's see where your favorite place is the bird in northern florida i guess you kind of i guess you kind of mentioned those were there any other places in northern florida ron that that you didn't mention that you would recommend for birding well uh uh the i did mention uh st george's island uh that's a wonderful place uh one of the most beautiful beaches in the world and uh i would definitely not miss that one the uh there are many birding spots in the apalachic color forest national forest which is a very large area that occupies a good chunk of the central part of the uh panhandle let's see what other places are good places uh well along the wakula river which i did refer to but uh taking a canoe uh down or up the wakula is not only a place to see lots of birds including uh uh different types of uh uh of um let's see maganzas that we haven't seen in this talk um and um uh and also amenities it's a river that emerges from one of the largest springs in the world a lot of water comes down from the uplands in southern georgia and bubbles up through the the limestone the florida limestone in the panhandle producing springs and these springs form rivers that flow to the sea less than uh 50 miles from their origin so that that's a wonderful spot and i recommend doing it by canoe nice um brenda molten asks uh because you mentioned a couple times ron a number of those species their breeding habitats will be uh up into the arctic and her question was why do birds breed there uh well there's a number of theories about that one of them is that the arctic has a very rapid flush of of food uh in the uh during the brief season and uh so it it's a concentration of insects and other and small animals and including small mammals uh in the tundra in particular which are great for uh raising young