A Weekend In The Keys
I packed up my favorite birding buddy (my mom) and we ventured for a girls trip to Key West with the hopes of la sagra’s and scissor-tailed flycatchers. We didn’t see them, but we did find my new favorite birding stop in the keys, Long Key State Park. The Golden Orb Trail was a beautiful walk that started with us seeing four yellow-crowned night heron and continued to dip and weave through the mangroves to the beaches and into the sea grape and gumbo limbo trees. We saw painted bunting, a vireo that we couldn’t identify (it’s still haunting me), common ground dove, royal tern, and more. After that, we headed down to Key West for the night so we could start our morning there. We were up early and after going for a walk to watch the sunrise, we went down to Fort Zachary Taylor State Park. There we spotted gulls, ibis, and dove as well as enough palm warbler to become slightly disappointed in them. We killed more time, stopped at the southernmost point, and grabbed some breakfast and coffee. Finally, it was almost 10am the Key West Tropical & Botanical Gardens was officially open. The place was beautiful and I added a yellow throated warbler to my list for the year. As we left the keys we counted magnificent frigates and ended up with 58 for the day to make a good trip a great trip.
