This morning I accompanied a group of birders (13) to Sanibel Island where we birded the Ding Darling NWR.  We birded from 9:00 to about 12:30.  It was a sunny morning and the tide was low and incoming.  I saw more birds there, both in numbers and variety, then I’ve seen in several years.  Highlights included White Pelicans, Roseate Spoonbills, Mergansers, Spotted Sandpipers, and several Reddish Egrets, including a white morph.

Afterwards, we drove to the Green Flash restaurant at the far end of Captiva for a nice lunch.  Except for the heavy traffic on Sanibel, it was quite a nice day.  Following is a report of my observations that I submitted to eBird.

Three local birders met at my house at 7:15 this morning for a birding trip to Prairie Creek Preserve.  We arrived at the entrance to the access road around 7:45; there were still some low-lying patches of fog, which soon burnt off.  We slowly traveled the access road to the Preserve, about 3.5 miles, observing birds along the way.

Our goal was to see and photograph Grasshopper Sparrows, which one of the group had seen about a week ago just inside the Preserve.  After arriving on county land, we stopped about 500 ft from the entrance.  We played recordings of both Grasshopper And Henslow Sparrow songs.  Within a few minutes, we had about a dozen sparrows perching in bushes along both sides of the road.  There was a mixture of Grasshopper Sparrows (8) and Savannah Sparrows.  They stayed for quite a while offering good looks.  All of the Grasshopper Sparrows seemed to be the migrant species, which are russet or brown in color, as opposed to the darker Florida sub-species.

Other highlights of the morning included Caracaras, Harrier, Kestrels, White-eyed Vireo, and House Wrens.  We also saw a Fox Squirrel.  Following is the list of birds observed during our trip that I reported to EBird.

Location:     Prairie Creek Preserve

Our Tuesday birding group (17 people today) visited the Babcock-Webb WMA.  The morning started out with some fog, then partly cloudy, which turned into overcast.  Our route was Tucker’s Grade, Oil Well Grade, Tram Grade, Seaboard Grade, and back out on Tucker’s Grade.  Interesting highlights included an Armadillo, Northern Harrier, several Eastern Meadowlarks, a small flock of Bluebirds, an Eastern-Screech Owl (a lifer for many), a Hairy Woodpecker (also a lifer for many), and several Brown-headed Nuthatches (seen by only a few).  Following is a report of my observations submitted to eBird.

On this cold and windy morning, only six people of our birding group showed up for our 2-hour trip north to Honeymoon Island.  We arrived at the causeway around 9:45.  We noticed a large flock (several hundred) of shorebirds on the south side of the causeway, which was sheltered from the north wind.  We stopped for about an hour, taking photos and admiring the mixture of birds.  We identified 16 species of birds in this group, including Black Skimmers, Marbled Godwits, American Oystercatchers, Red Knots, Black-bellied Plovers, Semipalmated Plovers, and Dunlins.

We continued across the causeway and stopped at the Nature Center.  From the back porch of the Center, we noticed some more shorebirds on a small spit of land and some birds swimming in the water.  Using a small scope set up by the Nature Center and two of our own scopes, we were able to identify 13 species, including Red-breasted Mergansers, Bufflehead, a lone Redhead, Lesser Scaup, Horned Grebes, and Pied-billed Grebes.

We then drove to the far parking lot, where the Osprey Trail started.  We walked this Trail and a portion of the Pelican Cove Trail.  We saw a Great Horned Owl nest with one Owl in it.  We also saw a Bald Eagle nest with one Eagle in it.  The Park Rangers said each bird was sitting on eggs.  There were also several Osprey nests in the area.  Other birds seen along the trails included a Cooper’s Hawk, Downy Woodpeckers, Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Palm Warblers, Yellow-rumped Warblers, Catbirds, and Cardinals.  Because of the cold and wind, we did not walk out to the Bird Observation Area at the point of the island.  However, this was unfortunate, because a listing on BRDBRAINS mentioned quite a number of water waters seen off of the point.

We left for the trip home around 2:30.  We decided this was a good place to visit again in the near future when the weather was more hospitable.

Our birding group of 15 people decided to stay local this week and visited the Prairie Creek Preserve located on US17 a few miles north of Punta Gorda.  We turned onto the access road off of US17 about 8:00 and slowly drove back to the Preserve a distance of about 5 miles.  We saw quite a number of birds along this road, including at least one Grasshopper Sparrow, observed several hundred feet from the highway.  This is the first time we saw them along the access road, outside of the Preserve.  We also saw an Eastern Towhee, my first sighting of this species in six visits.

It was about 11:00 when we reached the Preserve.  Other then a few birds in flight, the only birds we saw in the Preserve was a group of seven Bobwhites.  We then drove back to US17 and went to Hathaway Park along Washington Loop road to eat our lunch.  We did see a nice Gopher Tortoise in the Park.  Following is my eBird report of the birds seen at Prairie Creek Preserve, mostly along the access road.  Unfortunately, when you have a caravan of six cars driving along a road, it is very difficult to obtain photos of birds closeup.