I traveled north to Fort DeSoto this morning, thinking I may be able to take some images of warblers.  Wrong thinking!  I started in the East Woods area and saw nothing but a few Cardinals and two warblers high enough and moving so rapidly that I wasn’t able to identify them much less take a picture.  I then went to the Mulberry Bush area where I ran into Lyn Atherton.  She had just started and wasn’t seeing much.  She said last Saturday and Monday were good days for warblers.  I did see more Cardinals, Mockingbirds, some Gnatcatchers, and two small birds, again moving so quickly that I couldn’t identify them.  Mosquitoes were terrible in this area.

I decided to try my luck with the shorebirds and proceeded to North Beach.  There were several hundred shorebirds on a sandbar and a sandy point.  Birds seen included Short-billed Dowitchers, Dunlins, Marbled Godwits, all five species of Plovers (Black-bellied, Piping, Semipalmated, Snowy, and Wilson’s), Sanderlings, Least and Western Sandpipers, Black Skimmers, Ruddy Turnstones, and some Willets.  I was fortunate to obtain images of all five Plover species, all located on the sandy point.  For about twenty minutes, there were several flocks of birds flying around, including Laughing Gulls, Sandwich and Royal Terns, Black Skimmers, and some of the shorebirds.  I was able to get a few images of these flocks in flight.