Monday, December 22, 2014

Tallahassee Birding

Tuesday December 9th
Day Three - North Florida Trip

One of my target birds on this trip was to find a white-breasted nuthatch. This species rarely ventures any further south then the Red Hills of Tallahassee. Its reported that there are many reliable venues in and around the state capital. 
Marsh observed along nature trail at Tall Timbers

I had an interest in checking the Tall Timbers Research Station s private facility located just south of the Georgia border. We found the staff to be friendly and helpful.
Spent a couple of hours searching the nature trail. We managed to locate several brown-headed nuthatches along with a loud white-breast nuthatch. We also added ruby-crowned kinglet, carolina & house wrens, eastern bluebirds, eastern towhee, chipping sparrow, tufted titmice and pileated woodpecker.







Next stop was a pond on Biltmore Avenue,in Tallahassee to seek a couple more targets. Geese. 

The pond is home to around a hundred canada geese and a lone snow goose. Other species present here included ruddy ducks, shovelers and dunlins. We were informed by a lady walking her dog that they were hopefully that the pair of whooping cranes that wintered here last winter would return any day.
Our state bird - the Northern Mockingbird


As we still had some sun light left, Bob wanted another try at getting some additional photography at St Marks. Yesterday's precipitation slowed him down a bit. We had a couple of hours of day light and revisited some of the same stops as yesterday
Canada Goose

Snow Goose

Geese in Tallahassee

3 comments:

  1. It's been fun reading your reports of the trip, Tom. I'm curious to know the tally of lifers seen which will likely surprise me when I see the pics. Looking forward to catching up with them.

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    1. Bob, I only had the winter wren.

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    2. Another trip is in order. We were very lucky with the weather as it was. Much rain afterward.

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