This post and podcast episode is full of useful information for beginning birders, or anyone who is looking to get to know our area and the birds who visit, or live here year-round. There are great tips for watching birds on the coast, knowing when rare birds are in the area, and finding hot spots when traveling to a new location.
The Florida panhandle is in just the right place to host northern birds seeking a warmer home for winter, and South American birds whose winter coincides with our summer. Our area has hundreds of thousands of acres of conservation land, including hundreds of miles of coastal habitat for migrating shorebirds and ducks. We live in a birdwatching destination, and I invited two seasoned local birders to guide is through our most active season for birds.
Meet our guests
- Juli deGrummond is a board member of our area’s Audubon chapter, Apalachee Audubon. She coordinates chapter field trips, and contributes to the Apalachee Audubon blog. I first met Juli while producing a video segment on birdwatching around Lake Jackson during dry down years.
- Don Morrow volunteers for the Saint Marks National Wildlife Refuge. He goes out multiple times a month to survey shorebirds, and, in the winter, migratory ducks. He also chronicles his many observations over the seasons for the Friends of the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge. I first met Don when tagging along for an early morning of shorebird surveys.
Coast to Canopy blog posts are curated transcripts. My notes appear in italics.
What to expect at Lake Jackson this winter
Four of Tallahassee’s top ten eBird hotspots are on Lake Jackson or adjacent land. Faulk Drive Landing has the highest diversity of bird species on the app. If you’re not familiar with eBird, we go into more depth further down.
Fluctuating water levels and bird watching
Juli deGrummond : We’ve been in drought, and so the lake has been steadily dropping. Lake Jackson is known for the sinkhole that’s in it, Porter Sink. That sink periodically opens up and the lake drains. And when that happens, we get a lot of mudflats. Right now, the lake is looking pretty low. And, I’m hopeful we’re going to have that event happen again in the next few weeks.
I met Juli when filming a segment on birdwatching at Lake Jackson. As she says, the lake is dynamic, and birds flock to the water and the water’s edge as the lake expands and contracts. When Porter Sink is exposed, not all parts of the lake go dry. You can read all about Porter Sink in this 2021 post I wrote after it dried down. When the sink is exposed, it concentrates fish in smaller pools, making it easier for wading birds and raptors to feed on them.
The moving shoreline also creates mud flats in different places, making invertebrates more accessible to hungry birds. When the water recedes or the lake dries down, it exposes food-filled muck.
When the lake re-filled in January of 2023, birds were especially active immediately after. Ground that had been dry became saturated, making it easier for beaks to penetrate it and extract invertebrates.
The habitat around the lake
Juli deGrummond: It’s always good because there’s water there. It’s also a great habitat [around the lake]. So, around this time of year, we’re going to be looking for migrating flycatchers to show up there. Faulk Landing is a wonderful location for flycatchers. We get alder flycatcher every year. Currently there’s one there. We get least flycatchers sometimes.
Last year, I think it was last year, we had a brown crested flycatcher, which is a rarity from the west. Very uncommon. Ash-throated flycatchers, another one that can be a visitor that we’re on the lookout for.
Juli deGrummond: [Lake Jackson] has a good mix of habitat with hardwood trees, brushy undergrowth, willows, lake, mudflat. You can just get any variety of, of birds there. And there are warblers that will be passing through. So, I’m looking for those as well as the birds that are highly associated with the water, like egrets, herons, ducks, shorebirds.
Rob Diaz de Villegas: White pelicans show up every once in a while.
Juli deGrummond: They do. I haven’t seen any for a while, but they have been on the lake many times, and they’re in the area.
Rob Diaz de Villegas: I guess it was a couple of years ago that we shot that segment (on birding at Lake Jackson). They were out there in pretty large numbers at that point, I remember.
What to expect at the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge this winter
Don Morrow: Right now, we are really building up with shorebird migration. Shorebird migration starts very early with Arctic shorebirds starting to move through as early as July. Right now, we’ve gone from winter, when you have a couple of species of breeding shorebirds and some over-summering yearling shorebirds, the birds that don’t migrate in their first year, and you probably have maybe 150, 200 shorebirds on the refuge.
In early July, I did a shorebird survey this week and had over 1000 – 17 different species. Shorebirds are starting to stream through.
A lot of these birds are long jumpers. Some of these birds have been flying for several days, may have taken off from North Dakota. They’ll land here. Species like pictorial sandpiper. They’ll feed for a couple of days. They’ll bulk up till they end up weighing 50 to 75% more than their normal weight. And then they’ll take off, and they may land in Suriname. They don’t only jump the Gulf of Mexico, they see it as a minor impediment. They keep going, until they run out of energy.
Winter duck migration
Don Morrow: And we’re just starting to get into duck migration. We only have one breeding duck on the Refuge, wood duck. They’re year round, and we get Yankee wood ducks coming down in the winter.
But right now we’ve got blue-wing teal moving through. Blue-wing teal are the odd duck. They’re long distance migrants.
Most blue-wing teal are wintering in South America, some as far south as Brazil. And those blue-wing teal are now moving through the Refuge, because they’re just stopping and then jumping again. The number of blue-wing teal on the refuge changes every day. I had three yesterday, and I had, I think 45 two days before. But it can jump up to a couple of hundred birds, and you can go down to almost nothing
And starting in late October, and then in November, all the ducks come down. The duck population will jump from next to nothing, a handful of wood ducks in July, up to several thousand ducks from November through the beginning of February.
Rob Diaz de Villegas: And that’s a combination of ducks that are stopping and staying and then also moving on.
Don Morrow: Right at the beginning there still some ducks that are moving on. Northern shovelers, a lot of them are going down to the big islands in the Caribbean: Cuba, Hispaniola. But, starting in late October, we’re getting the ducks that stick. Lot of ducks are only coming down this far.
And so we’ll end up with 23 species of waterfowl visible on the Refuge over the winter period.
On the coast, watch the tides
Don Morrow: If you want to see shorebirds at Saint Marks, get a tide table and look at the tide table. (You can find tide charts online for various locations on our coast, including Saint Marks National Wildlife Refuge and Bald Point State Park.)
At high tide, all those birds are pushed in.
Don Morrow: At low tide, as the mudflats and sand flats all along the coast are exposed. they’ve got plenty of places to feed, and they’re going to spread out. I have a hard time finding them.
I set all of my shorebird surveys at Saint Marks up for a 2.5 foot tide, because 2.5 feet at the mouth of the Saint Marks River is the magic number that covers all of the mudflats and pushes everybody into the interior ponds. If you go to Tower Pond, right now, if you go on a low tide, there’s virtually nothing there. You may have 20 or 30, shorebirds sitting in there. If you go at high tide, you could have a couple of hundred right now. In the middle of winter, you could have a couple thousand.
Other north Florida winter birding destinations
Juli deGrummond: As we move into winter, we’re going to have sparrows. So we’ll be looking at grassy areas as well. Tall Timbers is known for that. And that’s kind of a longleaf pine/ wiregrass habitat there (Tall Timbers Research Station is not open to the public, but they periodically have public events).
Juli deGrummond: And, the [Apalachicola] National Forest, this is another good spot for that.
Juli deGrummond: We have a lot of different lakes. I’m always looking for areas that have water. Piney Z. Lake, Lafayette Heritage Trail is a really great birding spot.
Juli deGrummond: If you wanted to travel some, then Saint Marks is always a good place to go.
I frequent Bald Point [State Park], which is in Franklin County near Alligator Point. That’s a fantastic migrant trap there.
You’ll get lot of raptors there. I’ve had days where, I’ve had like fifty or sixty kestrels, and ten to fifteen merlins, and a couple of peregrine falcons, as well as the warblers and regular residents that are there. Shorebirds and such.
Winter hummingbird visitors
Juli deGrummond: The thing I look forward to every winter, this is actually at my house. So it’s not a birding hot spot – yet. But, the hummingbirds.
Growing up, my grandmother actually said to me, take down your hummingbird feeder or the hummingbirds will stay, and then they’ll die, because they’ll freeze.
And so I grew up believing that you had to take down your hummingbird feeder at a certain time as fall approached, and that’s actually incorrect. Winter here in Florida is one of the best places for hummingbirds.
I get regular rufous hummingbirds, and black-chinned hummingbirds that overwinter at my house.
I know multiple people that have other birds that are considered rarities here in our area that overwinter with them, hummingbird-wise, like buff-bellied hummingbird or calliope hummingbird. And, if you don’t have your feeders up in the winter, you’re not likely to have them. You might happen upon one passing through, but you’re not likely to have them overwinter with you.
My hummingbirds are banded, and that gives me information that they’re the same birds. And, just this year, on September 12th, I had one of my banded hummingbirds return to my house. It’s a female ruby-throated hummingbird, so not one of the rarities, but she spends the winter with me. The second that bird showed up, I knew it was one of my previous birds because she went to a spot and she was like, hey, this is my spot.
And she started bullying the other hummingbirds. So, immediately I… took pictures of her legs and got the band number and was able to get that information.
Rob Diaz de Villegas: The hummingbird migration just sounds kind of impressive, if you think about a bird that size and how far it flies, right? That’s pretty cool.
Don Morrow: They are trans-Gulf migrants. This tiny, little, ounce-and-a-half bird is taking off and flying for 600 miles across the water. I can’t do that.
Bird banding
Bird banding is a way of marking birds so that an observer can record their information and report sightings to whichever agency is tracking the birds.
The marks are a combination of metal and plastic bands, as you can see in the image above. The US Geological Survey gives permitted researchers a list of color combinations and bands. By assigning different scientists different color combinations, the USGS ensures that no two birds of a species have the same combination. Whenever a bird watcher observes a snowy plover on a Florida beach, they can photograph it and report it.
As a bird gets reported over time, researchers can learn new things about its movements and behavior. In the snowy plover segments I produced in 2018, Florida Fish and Wildlife biologists shared a few things they had learned about the birds from banding them. For one thing, a two-day old chick can walk 13 miles in search of food. Also, snowy plovers nest more than once a year, with different mates.
As Juli and Don mention in the podcast, different bird species might have different styles of bands. Many of the species that receive bands are imperiled in some way, such as snowy and piping plovers, and red cockaded woodpeckers. Others might be a part of a specific study, such as brown-headed nuthatches at Tall Timbers.
Juli deGrummond: Anytime I see a bird that has a band, I work hard to get the band. I actually used to go on shorebirds surveys at Phipps [Preserve, on Alligator Point], and there we would be documenting the piping plovers and snowy plovers, and American oyster catchers, all of those birds. They would frequently have bands, and we would be collecting that information. (We went bird watching with Florida Audubon at the Phipps Preserve in 2018).
Winter vs. Breeding Plumage
I ask about migratory birds’ winter plumage, using yellow-rumped warblers as an example. They’re a winter visitor to Florida, and I was surprised when, on a visit to their northern range in the summer, their plumage was entirely different than what I would see in my yard in the winter.
Don Morrow: Most birds have two plumages a year. They have a breeding plumage that’s really brightly colored. Presumably the male yellow-rumped warbler that you’re talking about seeing [in Colorado in June] was in his breeding plumage.
[In the summer] you want to look good, want to impress the ladies.
But then you want to come down [to Florida] the rest of the year. You don’t want to be nearly as bright, because if you’re ever brightly colored, you’re going to attract predators. And you don’t necessarily want to do that.
One exception to that are ducks. Ducks need to be in breeding plumage to attract mates, but ducks do their mate formation in the winter. And that’s why the ducks that you see down at Saint Marks in the winter are all nice, brightly colored and look like they do in the bird book, because they’re in breeding plumage.
They come down here… most species, as individual birds. And when they fly back, they fly back as a pair, and they mate up. They then go through a molt after they finish breeding. And some of them are still in a drab alternate plumage when they first come down here right now.
Any blue-wing teal you see [when we recorded in September] does not look like the book. It’s just a brownish little duck. Because they haven’t finished molting yet. They won’t finish molting until probably October. But most of them are have already molted again into their breeding plumage before they get down here.
Most of the winter birds you see are going to be drabber than they do in breeding plumage. [If] you want to see them looking really good, look at them on spring migration. That’s when you don’t have confusing fall warblers. You have striking spring warblers.
Plumage isn’t always the best way to identify a bird species
Juli deGrummond: Well, Just like you were saying about warblers, people sometimes have a tendency to stay away from warblers or sparrows because, the fact of the matter is… part of birding is looking at the finer details.
So you just train yourself to look for different things, like you always look at – what color are the legs? What does the bill look like? I personally like when birds are molting and they look real ugly. I just find that humorous.
Juli deGrummond: That’s what I think of when you started talking about the yellow-rumped warblers. Before they get beautiful, they get really ratty looking and patchy and, just looking at the structural part of the bird versus the plumage.
Plumage can be a key. I went to a book signing, [and] the guy was talking about identifications. One of the things he really recommended was not looking at the plumage, not looking at the colors, and really just looking at almost like the shadow of the bird. Different guides have different keys like that, where they show a black outline of the bird and kind of becoming familiar with the shape of that bird.
Of course, we’re human. We can’t help but look at the plumage and the colors, and those things are going to be keys. And they do tell us things. But, you know, when you see something that looks funny, like, ratty yellow rump warbler, then, you know, I personally like to just study it and look at it and kind of think, okay, what is it?
Have bird guides ruined bird ID?
Don Morrow: I’ve heard it said that Roger Tory Peterson ruined birding for people. He had his system with key feel marks. [In his bird guides], there would be a little arrow that pointed to something. And that caused people to look only at the key field mark. Like Julie says, there are other things. There’s the shape, there’s the behavior, there’s the microhabitat that birds are in.
And I told people that you should be able to identify yellow-rumped warbler without seeing the yellow rump. That’s not necessarily the best field mark on it. And if you really start looking at birds, it’s like anything else. I decided to learn wildflowers one time because I figured, hey, it can’t be hard. There’s blue ones and yellow ones are there.
You start looking and you go, oh my gosh. There’s so much detail in here that you can pick up on that you don’t see until you start looking. Think of music. If you listen to music with somebody who is a musician, who really understands, they understand that music. They see or hear much more of what’s going on.
And if you’re if you want to be a birder or start looking at birds, there’s that detail, that wealth, that richness in there that changes all those birds from little gray jobs or little brown jobs, into very distinct individual species.
Sometimes, it’s more bird listening than bird watching
Don Morrow: Sometimes you’re sitting there with several thousand dollars worth of optics, and you’re going, “why do I have these?” Because you’re getting most of your birds by hearing them, by hearing calls that are out in thickets in the night.
If you want owls… I rarely see owls, but I get owls. The other morning, I didn’t see a single one. [Bird calls are] a very important part of birding.
We have now, tools like Merlin, a free app for your phone that you can turn on. Merlin is very good. Makes mistakes. You have to be careful. Either that, or I actually heard a mute swan, at the double bridges down at Saint Marks one morning (mute swans are native in Europe, and Asia, and have been introduced to the northern U.S.). So every now and then, it will just come up with something just out of the blue. But most of the time, you can turn Merlin on, and Merlin will tell you what you’re hearing.
Juli deGrummond: It’s a fantastic app. And a lot of people who aren’t even really serious birders use it… like Don said, it’s a fantastic tool, but it is also a tool. Just like if you have a hammer and nails and wood, that doesn’t make a birdhouse. You have to put work to it. So you need the human part of that equation.
That’s something that we see on eBird where people who are not real experienced will frequently report something simply based on Merlin. I always encourage people to not do that. You want to make sure that you know what it is you’re listening to. And Merlin is a great tool for that, because you can hold it in your hand and see when it picks up a bird, and you can key in on what it’s picking up. It also does have where you can play that bird’s call and listen to it and go, yeah, that is what I heard.
Merlin IDs can be corroborated with photos. The Cornell All About Birds web page has photos and audio for each species that you can compare with yours, and it has range information. eBird also has data about what birds you can expect in your area at a time of year. All of these tools are produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Merlin might also alert you to keep an eye out for a bird:
Don Morrow: As a geriatric birder, Merlin’s hearing is better than mine. One of the things I use Merlin for when I’m out walking is to hear birds that I can’t hear, and alert me to the idea that there’s a parula warbler somewhere around here, and I should go looking for it. Then I know to look.
eBird
Juli deGrummond: You mentioned Cornell Lab. So, Merlin, eBird, Birdcast … they all work together, and they’re all run by Cornell. So the information that we put in is reviewed by them and used by them. Scientists use it. It’s a way that we can really have an impact.
it is a fantastic tool. If I meet a birder who doesn’t use eBird, I encourage them to use it. There’s so many different bits of information that you can get from it.
Juli deGrummond: You can look up a place, you can look up a species. Let’s just let’s say the alder flycatcher. I can type in alder flycatcher, it’s going to give me the top pictures of alder flycatcher. It’s going to give me an overview. It’s going to show me range maps. And then I’m wondering when can I see one here. So I can change the location to Leon County. And it will then give me a bar chart showing me when they have been seen in our area.
It’ll also show me the local photos and sound recordings of that bird. The photo database is very valuable. If I’m trying to familiarize myself with the bird, and I want to really get to know it, and I don’t have the opportunity to sit for hours with that bird and watch it myself – that’s a first step that I can take.
For example, in November I’ll be going to Cuba. So I go to eBird, I look at Cuba, I go to the hotspots, I look and see what people are seeing. I go to the different species that are listed on those eBird checklists. I click on that species and then go through a whole litany of photos, not just the top photos.
Top photos are great. They show you the best look of that bird. Picture that could be in a magazine, being very clear, concise, and typically beautiful. But if you go to the other photos, you get more of what – usually when we see a bird, it’s not going to be as gracious as that and just sit there and go, “well, here’s here’s my wing bar, here’s my yellow leg, or here’s my side view.”
They’re usually going to be fleeting glimpses. You’re going to get bad looks at times. And so it can be really valuable to look at those bad photos and say, okay, that’s this bird. It helps you, familiarize yourself with them.
Turning on the rare bird alert on eBird
Don Morrow: I’ll be going out to Arizona next month. My son lives out there. And what I’ll do is, I’ll turn on the rare bird alert for Pima County, Arizona when I go out. I’ll be birding while I’m out there, but if something really rare shows up, I don’t want to get home and then read that somebody had seen a bird that I really, really want to see later on.
During the winter of 2022/ 23, a white wagtail crossed the Atlantic and landed in Leon County. This rare visitor caught the attention of the birding community, drawing birdwatchers from hundreds of miles away.
Juli deGrummond: Actually, I found that bird. So, it’s very special to my heart. One of my favorite birds that I ever found.
I would say 600 people came to Leon County just to see that bird. You can go in eBird and see how many reports there are. And there were also people who actually don’t use eBird that did come. I spoke to people who came from as far as Kansas and Kentucky…
One of the things about birding is that we we love to collect lists, like Don mentioned. He probably has an idea of his Arizona list, and then his life bird list. Just birds that he’s seen in his life or his United States list. We all kind of keep lists and birders get very serious about that at times.
We will travel long distance, we’ll spend a lot of money, will go to an area, we’ll pay to stay in a hotel, we’ll eat in there restaurants, we’ll buy gas, we’ll stop at their convenience stores, and spend money in the area.
The St. Marks Refuge and Pinky the flamingo
Don Morrow: But yeah, significant economic impact. If you look at Saint Marks, one of the things I do in the winter, you look at their license tags that you’re seeing. You’re seeing license tags from all over, and you’re seeing people coming in just to do birding…
Wakulla is not on the mainline to anywhere. But they’re staying in the area. They’re buying food, they’re buying gasoline.
I ran into some folks at Saint Marks. We walked out, we found the flamingo. At the time, it was hanging on one of the back ponds.
I said, “where are you guys from?” And they were from Cleveland, and they had left work Friday night, traded off driving to get down to Saint Marks to get the flamingo. And, this was on Sunday morning. They’d missed it on Saturday. They said, “boy, we’re sure glad we don’t have to do this drive again.”
And I said, “did you do it before?” They’d been down the weekend before on a long drive. Missed the flamingo. Went back, worked all week and then drove back down to get the flamingo again.
There’s also a spring bird migration
Don Morrow: The spring migration is a very exciting time. It’s a faster migration than than fall. Birds are interested in getting up and grabbing the best breeding sites. Plus, they’re in their best plumage. We will get probably 47 species of birds coming through here that we won’t see any other time of the year that are just pure migrants.
They don’t nest here. They don’t winter here. And so spring is the time to go out and see them at their best.
There are also several bird species that come up from South America to nest here in the spring.
Don Morrow: About 35 species that breed here, that come in to nest from South America. Summer tanager. Orchard oriole. The parula warblers come up there. [They’re] one of our earliest migrants, they start showing up in February. There there are a lot of birds that are here only in the summer, but there are almost twice as many birds that are only here in the winter.
Juli deGrummond: Any time there’s migration, anything can happen. You never know if you’re going to find a white wagtail or a couch’s king bird or something else that’s not expected to be in your area ever. So just keep your eyes open and get out there and have a good time.
Like what you read? Love natural north Florida? Subscribe to the WFSU Ecology Blog. You might also enjoy our ecology podcast, Coast to Canopy, and the WFSU Ecology YouTube channel. Most importantly, consider becoming a member to support the work we do.
We’d love to hear from you! Leave your comments below.
