#birding
7 posts tagged.
Ding Darling NWR — Florida's Best Wildlife Drive and Where the Roseate Spoonbills Stop
Four miles of one-way road through 6,400 acres of mangrove and tidal flat on Sanibel Island. Time it with low tide and you'll see roseate spoonbills, reddish egrets, and white pelicans at twenty feet. Closed Fridays so the birds get a rest.
Crested Caracara — The Mexican Eagle You'll See on a Florida Fence Post, and Why Birders Drive 3 Hours for It
The crested caracara is a tropical falcon that lives nowhere else east of the Rio Grande except a 500-to-1,000-bird isolate population in central Florida's cattle prairies. Mexico put it on the flag. Florida birders drive three hours to find one on a fence post.
Florida Birding 101 — How to Start Without Buying $2000 of Gear, and the 10 Birds You'll See on Day One
Florida is the busiest birding state in the Lower 48 — 500+ species, roseate spoonbills wading next to alligators, scrub-jays you can't see anywhere else on Earth. A $25 pair of binoculars and a free Cornell app, and you're a birder. Here's the on-ramp.
Florida Sandhill Crane — The Year-Round Resident That's Not the Whooping Crane You Drove Out to See
Florida has its own four-foot, gar-oo-ing, year-round sandhill crane — about 5,000 of them on the prairies, pastures, and golf courses of the central peninsula. Joined every winter by 25,000 migratory cousins. Here's where to find them, how to tell them from a whooper, and what their courtship dance looks like.
Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive — 11 Miles of Bike-Through Alligator Country
Forty-five minutes northwest of Orlando, an 11-mile gravel loop runs the north shore of Florida's fourth-largest lake. Open Friday through Sunday, sunrise to 3pm. Two hundred bird species, easily a hundred alligators, zero entrance fees — and most Orlando residents have never been.
Florida Scrub-Jay — Oscar Scherer State Park and Florida's Only Endemic Bird
The Florida Scrub-Jay is the only bird species found nowhere else on Earth but Florida. Population fell from 40,000 to 4,000 in a century. Oscar Scherer State Park, Sarasota County, is where you go to see one — at sunrise, on the Lester Finley Trail.
Reddish Egret — Merritt Island NWR's Dancing Fisher
Roughly 2,000 breeding pairs in the entire United States — and Merritt Island NWR holds the densest viewing strip. Drive Black Point an hour after low tide and you'll see the canopy-feeding dance no other heron does.