by Ted Below
A little after we (Bev Anderson, Guy Fischer and I) anchored off the northeast corner of the Marco Colony, also known as the ABC Islands, to record the sundown fly-in, Guy called, "Look at this guy." An adult Brown Pelican came skimming by the boat with a huge, at least for a pelican, live piece of Red Mangrove. Immediately he (mostly males bring in the nesting material and females build the nest) plopped into the water, appearing beat from the exertion. After tossing the branch around to get a better grip, and I suspect catching his breath, he lifted it high out of the water, gave a shake then stumbled into the air again. With much obvious effort the pelican made it to the B island. This is the largest live branch I have seen being carried into the colony in 22 years of observing pelicans during the nesting season.
This brings up what can be a sore point for many dedicated bird watchers; a lot of people who call themselves bird watchers don't watch birds. What they do is list birds; they see a bird, identify it and put it on a list and then go on to the next one, never looking to see what the birds are doing. In this country we call them "Listers" and some have so many lists (life, year, month, day, continent, country, state, county, home, on and on and on) that they keep a list of their lists. For some, this is fun and it gets them outdoors, which of course is great, but many others think, they miss the best part of bird watching: seeing what birds are doing. Often it is better than a three ring circus.
The following, are a few examples of what some of the Listers miss, by just twitching (that's what the British call it) bird names off a list.
One of the best examples of observing unusual behavior was described to me my John Douglas, another of the Marco sundown fly-in censusers. One morning several weeks ago, he was on the old boardwalk at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, when one of the severe cold fronts came through. He ducked into a rain shelter that was just on the edge of the Pond Cypress, as it started blowing and raining heavily. While he sat, waiting out the storm, he noticed that on both sides of the shelter in medium sized cypresses, there were warblers. In the tree on the left he recorded 142 Yellow-rumped Warblers which almost seemed to be in the tree in layers. As it rained hard the top layer of about 15 bathed, in a few seconds they moved down to the bottom of the layers and the next layer moved up and bathed. It looked as if all the Yellow-rumps, were playing musical chairs to bathe.
Meanwhile, on the cypress on the right, were about 40 Palm Warblers, some sitting, some bathing, but with no organization. When the rain let up the Yellow-rumps burst off their tree, formed a ball so tight that John said, "There wasn't space for another bird in the ball," then flew over the marsh, the treetops and out of sight, keeping their formation. Conversely, the Palm Warblers just filtered away. What a wonderful show!
Early this Fall at the Caxambas Pass mud flats, there were about 5,000 shorebirds resting on the oyster bars. Just after I arrived and started to count them, all of the small shorebirds, mostly Western Sandpipers, flushed and started flying around in several tight balls. This is how they act when threatened by a falcon and usually occurs when there is a Peregrine around, but it was odd because the larger shorebirds didn't flush. I had never observed this kind of behavior before.When a Peregrine dives, all of the birds on the bar except pelicans flush into the air. The shorebirds fly around in tight ball formation, at times several thousand to the ball, swiftly zooming back and forth. Occasionally a Peregrine will attack one of the balls; the formation holds until the last moment, then a hole opens and the falcon shoots through, empty talloned. This time as the little sandpipers swooped back and forth, a small falcon whipped by me and landed in a nearby mangrove clump. It was a Merlin, a small edition of a Peregrine. It makes sense that the larger shorebirds didn't flush because of a small predator that couldn't handle pray as big as they were, but it is behavior I had never seen or heard of before.
So! bird watchers don't just twitch, open your eyes and watch, some of the best shows in town are free.
First published in the Collier County Audubon Society's newsletter, Audugram, in March, 1996