There are basically two methods of birdwatching – you go out and move through a landscape and try to see what you can see, or you stay in one place and wait to see what pops up in front of you. I generally prefer the first method, as you see more birds that way, and also because I am not all that in touch with my patient side.
For a couple of days, though, I’d had the notion in my head of heading over to Fort Zach and sitting at a picnic table with a cheese toast, a con leche, and a pair of binoculars and seeing what I could see.
I’d been thinking it was too early for migration. April 15 is generally considered the date when things really get going, even if birds are not beholden to any calendar. But I’d been up on the roof of The Studios of Key West a week or so before and in the last light of day caught sight of the pointy-winged silhouette of a peregrine falcon as it flew overhead, crossed over the treetops, and landed on the communication tower on Southard Street. (Peregrines like to perch on the highest thing around.)
I hadn’t seen a peregrine since the southbound migration in the fall. It was possible there was a peregrine hanging around here all winter unnoticed, but it seemed doubtful.
Soon after, at the Botanical Gardens, I racked up 10 or so warbler species in about an hour. I’d been seeing most of those over the winter, but not in the same volume. And then there were the common grackles I’d heard from the outdoor shower after not hearing them since October.
I try not to think of the months between migration as the doldrums – there are still birds to see if you make the effort – but I do love those moments when the tide shifts, those times when the bird world is moving into action, when the cast of characters becomes uncertain and hard to predict.
Maybe it was still early in the season, but cheese toast and a potential parade of migrating birds. What a nice morning that would be.
When I finally had a gap in my schedule I did the pro move and called Sandy’s a couple minutes before leaving the house, then stopped there and went to the back window. (The front window is for amateurs. At least in season.)
Things started to look grim on Butler Boulevard when traffic came to a halt and I realized there were at least 30 cars lined up ahead of me waiting to get into the park. I thought about turning around and heading over to Truman Waterfront to find a park bench, but it was unlikely to be birdy there. I thought about heading over to the Botanical Garden where I generally had good luck, but no doubt my cheese toast would cool and congeal before I made it there. Same if I waited until I could find a bench in the park, which didn’t seem all that likely.
So I sullenly ate my cheese toast and sipped my con leche in my idling truck, stuck behind a guy in a golf cart rocking out to high-volume Foreigner like it was the coolest thing in the world. (The body language of his two young sons indicated otherwise.)
I was cheered up when I saw a warbler of unknown species drop and disappear into one of the trees in the middle of the traffic circle closest to the entrance.
It was the last day of March, and the last day of my annual pass, and when I went through the gate it felt a little bit like getting away with something. As I was rolling up my window after scanning my card I heard the ratchet call of a belted kingfisher.
I parked in the third lot, near the golf cart guy, whose playlist had moved on to Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” which was an improvement. (“Oh my, my, oh hell, yes…”)
The wind was up and there were red flags at the heads of all the paths to the beach showing it was a hazardous day to swim.
I did a loop in the small hammock of native trees at the west end of the beachfront, and was thinking maybe it was too crowded to see any birds, but then an ovenbird, most often a denizen of the forest floor, hopped up to an eye level branch and gave me a decent look. Then a female black-and-white warbler barber poled up the trunk of a buttonwood. Two species I’d been seeing all winter, but not in that spot.
In the parking lot I crossed paths with a woman who was yelling, “I’m trying to get there, but I’m wore out now,” into her phone.
At the head of the Fort View Nature Trail a yellow prairie warbler leapt up and gave me a nice sideview of all his yellowness. Prairie warblers are here year round, but they are damn handsome birds.
Next there was a yellow-rumped warbler, which might have been there all winter, though probably wasn’t, and would definitely be moving north in the next week or two.
On the berm a bird flew across the path in front of me and dropped down into the thicket. It looked a little larger than a warbler but much smaller than, say, a catbird. I figured I’d lost it, but decided to try at least to be a little patient.
It was tough with all the branches moving in the wind and the shadows all shifting around, but I caught sight of the bird for a millisecond and saw the brownish-olive body and the dark cap. Which made me think of a red-eyed vireo, a migrant that would probably continue on north soon.
But then I caught a better look at the bird when it faced me, and the dark throat stripes, which always remind me of the mustache of Lemmy, the lead singer of Motörhead. Which made it a black-whiskered vireo.
Black-whiskereds are a Caribbean species whose range stretches up into South Florida. And, as a species, they pretty much abandon the continent every fall to overwinter in the northeastern corner of South America.
A local migrant come home to roost. A definitive sign that the spring migration is on.
