Last Ditch Effort
It’s December 30th and I am at 283. Time to phone a friend (aka my mom). We head out to Arthur Marshall to go find the yellow bellied flycatcher that has been posted on eBird and the Whatsapp group I’m on. We went around 3:00 because the weather looked like it was going to cause trouble and started on the boardwalk. I had gone out three other times already looking for this flycatcher and had an idea of where it was seen so I felt like we had a good chance. On our second lap around the boardwalk we were distracted by some red bellied woodpeckers and a yellow bellied sapsucker when my mom spotted it. “Shelby!” She said as she pointed right above her. There it was, a cute little flycatcher with a very noticeable yellow belly. I love when a bird is named true to its looks. He flew from branch to branch stopping for a brief moment right in front of us before taking off deeper into the cypress trees. 284.
We woke up early on December 31 and started on Alligator Alley with the goal of ending in Sanibel for the night. One thing I had wanted to do this year was stop at all the recreation areas along I-75 to look for birds, so with my good luck charm by my side, we started exploring. As we got on the road, a dense fog made visibility difficult as we joked how crazy it would be if this didn’t lift(oh will I regret this joke later). We approached the first rec area and decided to pass it because the fog was so thick, as we were about 500 feet from the exit, the fog cleared. “That’s a sign!” My mom yelled as we whipped the car over into the parking lot. We walked up and along the canal for 30 minutes as all the birds started singing about the fog clearing. We saw a common myna and a hermit thrush adding two more to my list before the fog came back and we hopped in the car to continue on. We stopped at a few more rest stops on our way, not having much luck especially with the low visibility, so we made a detour down to Naples to stop at Ten Thousand Islands Marsh Trail. Not much luck, so we headed on to Marco Island for a lunch stop at The Crabby Lady. We stopped at the mudflats under the bridge and saw a bunch of shorebirds but no new species. After lunch we stopped to look and make sure no new birds came in, and instead we saw high tide had washed away the mudflats for the afternoon. Well that’s good timing.
We finally made our way to Sanibel and stopped at the J.N. Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge and drove down their scenic tour. We were still fighting fog, but the first group of birds we saw included the most still reddish egret I’ve ever seen and I started happily snapping pictures in the low light conditions hoping for the best. Sitting with a group of willet, I saw the upturned bill of a marbled godwit, a new species! We continued through the rest of the drive, spotting hooded mergansers, dunlin, willet, and many more shorebirds and waterfowl. We finished the drive and drove through the rest of Sanibel amazed by the resilience of this island as we surveyed the damage hurricane Milton left behind this year. Palm trees seemed as dead as other trees not adapted to a hurricane environment, sand was still in some parking lots and most public beaches were closed and noticeably under repair. We drove back over the bridges to our hotel as the fog quickly became a thick blanket making the cars in front of us fade away into an eerie abyss. Time to review photos and put my final count into eBird!
