I watch a lot of bike racing. For some reason it is the only sport I’ve ever consistently cared about. The early part of the season recently finished up with what are known as the Spring Classics – a series of mostly one-day races, many of which have been run for well over a century. Races like Paris-Roubaix, Liege-Bastone-Liege, La Flèche Wallonne and Amstel Gold.
Hills often make or break a race, the places where some riders thrive and some come up short. And the hills on these courses are so steeped in cycling culture that they all have names, even the small ones. It’s not “that part of Riverside Avenue that climbs up a couple hundred feet on the south side of town.” The hills are called things like Côte de Saint-Roch, the Couberg, the Eyserbosweg, and the Mur de Huy, with Huy being the town and mur meaning wall. Such site specificity brings character to the race, a sense of history and also a pretty clear idea of where things are happening on the map.
There is a similar site specificity in the birder world in places like Central Park in New York. Birders don’t say they saw an American kestrel over by the grassy place near West 65th Street, they say they saw it over by Sheep Meadow, Pilgrim Hill, Falconer’s Hill, Sparrow Rock or the Ramble.
There have been a lot of birders in the Keys these last few weeks, because it’s migration time and the Keys are one of the great places to see migrating birds. Fort Zach is an especially good place to see migrants. But it can be hard to quickly explain to people where a bird was because no one has really drawn up a map of the place and named all the little sections, at least not in a way that is useful for birders.
While birding with my friend Rafael Galvez at Fort Zach the other day last week, I was kind of complaining about this.
Rafael’s response was, “Just name them, dude. No one else is going to do it.”
He may have added, “Or care.”
It was an inspiration.
To do this, at some point I’m going to need to sit down and draw a detailed map. But that doesn’t mean I can’t start trying out names for places ahead of time.
For instance, there’s a small stretch along the edge of the moat, near the blacksmith shop and the entrance to the fort. The water level is a few feet down from the path, and there is a small slope that allows you to look down at a gentle angle, rather than having to stare up into the trees. It is generally a good place to see migrants because they all seem to like to bathe and preen there. And for that reason I’ve decided to name it the Spa.
No place can be all things to all birds, but the Spa is pretty popular.
I have seen birds like Würdemann’s herons and yellow-crowned night herons standing stoically in the branches above the water. The other day a Chuck-will’s-widow snoozed on one of the lower horizontal branches, confident his cryptic plumage had flummoxed everyone’s occipital lobes. (It did at first, then it didn’t.)
On my most recent trip to the park, after walking around for an hour or so, I sat down in the leaf litter with my binoculars at the ready and decided to survey the Spa’s clientele.
There were a few larger songbirds. Gray catbirds, mostly on solo missions, darted in and out through the shadows. Grackles came in and announced themselves with their yellow eyes and their creaking call. A trio of female indigo buntings landed at the same time in three different sets of branches.
Most of the patrons were warblers, unsurprisingly, mostly palm warblers. About 80% of the time that I’d find a bird in my binoculars and manage to focus, it would be a palm. More than once I believe I said “ugh” out loud when this happened.
It’s not the palm warblers’ fault that they are so common. But maybe, for public relations reasons, they could back off with grabbing your attention so often.
One of the trickier aspects of this time of year is you don’t know if you’re seeing the same individuals from one day to the next. These probably weren’t the same birds I’d been seeing since October. These birds were most likely recent arrivals from the south. But you couldn’t be totally sure.
For every 10 palm warblers, I saw one blackpoll warbler, a species that inspires no “ugh.” We tend to see blackpolls here for two or three weeks in spring, which gives them special-guest vibes. They are exceptionally rare in the fall, as most of the population veers off the east coast in places north of Cape May, New Jersey, and flies a few thousand miles over the ocean to South America. Their return routes are less intense, but they are still believed to fly directly from South America to Jamaica and/or Cuba, and then to here and parts north.
Besides being migratory daredevils, they are also handsome birds, attractively streaky with vibrantly orange legs, the males having a black do-rag-like cap that hides their eyes.
A pair of American redstarts, male and female, flitted through the scene, as if they just wanted to make sure they got on the list, followed by male and female black-throated blue warblers who arrived and departed separately.
I caught sight of the yellow and black of a prairie warbler and wondered if it was one that was going to breed here, or if it would continue on north. There was a northern yellow warbler, which was pretty easy to ID, and then a rather plain Tennessee warbler, which threw me for a moment with all its non-distinctiveness and the fact I don’t see them every year.
The most unexpected creature of the afternoon was the raccoon, young and skinny looking, that stepped out from the (yet unnamed) wooded section near the blacksmith shop. The animal gave me the once-over for a few minutes before deciding I wasn’t a threat, then walked down the incline to the waters edge.
All the birds disappeared from the Spa, but then he walked further down the canal, and a few of them came back. Mostly palm warblers.
