birds « John Galea's Blog

Birding in Long Boat Key Florida!

Yup … Road trip time! While this trip was by no means a birding trip, it’s always a great excuse to be outside! While some of this post is equally applicable to any kind of birding trip other parts are more specific. So let start out with Tech … Of course! I find it helpful to have a laptop along for the trip, so I bought a small, inexpensive, good battery life, used laptop, Lenovo X390 for just this purpose. Using a dual slot SD card reader I can easily offload the photos on the go from both of our cameras, and keep them organized by locations when we visit more than one place in a day. To keep the phones and laptop always charged I bought a USBC PD lighter plug for the car. I always carry along extra batteries for the cameras and extra memory cards just in case.

Anytime you are away from your home area, and this is a long way from home, your going to see new birds, field guides can be helpful, but there are lots of tools to help you on your phone, laptop and web. I wrote another post on the subject of bird id. Using these tools means you need to be online, but then so does most navigation tools like Waze anyway, so I bought the data roaming option for our cell phones to allow us to keep in touch, research, and ID on the go!

I found a great resource, Sarasota Audubon as a good place to start, and of course, getting tips from other birders. I find it helpful to make a map of the locations so you can group your trip based on locations. I use Google maps for this, and here is a map of the places I looked into. We did rent a kayak from Happy Paddler and hired a guide for a mangrove tour, and loved it! Even saw a rookery!

So in 9 days of birding, here are some fun facts … we hit 14 different places, took 14541 pics amounting to 660G of space on the two cameras. Fortunately I’d upgraded the drive on the laptop to 2TB to make sure there was LOTS of space and took along another 500G uSD card if needed. In this pile of pictures, and although we have not yet sorted/edited/ID’d we already know we have 30 new to us (including two near threatened species) photos of birds (lifers), and three new to us photos of animals. With so much shoreline and pristine beaches Long Boat Key is really a birding paradise! Fun fact, Parakeets are NOT native to Florida. So many people have released their pets, they are breeding in the wild and considered an invasive species. Here are some of the highlights … When I edit/sort/publish the directories I will add links to the pics for you to enjoy. For now, here are some highlights:

In addition to these lifers, we were shocked and amazed to see so many Ospreys, sanderlings everywhere on the beach (so cute to watch them run about), black bellied plovers, and two great horned owl nests with babies! In the GTA we are always thrilled to see one black bellied plover or sanderling. we also got to see an adult little blue heron and adult yellow crowned night heron for the first time. And almost tripped over a Wilson’s snipe leaving one of the places.