Evans Pond has taught me a lot about birds. For years, I’ve walked by this small kidney-shaped drop of water in the Woodland Drives neighborhood. Before I knew much of anything about birds, I’d notice ducks or the occasional visiting wood stork, and wonder who they were. My wife took note of my curiosity, apparently, and one year, my father-in-law gave me a Sibley’s bird guide and a pair of binoculars for Christmas.
Armed with these tools, I came here to learn about the different species of wading birds, about cormorants and anhingas, and that pied-billed grebes weren’t ducks. I noticed that our ducks changed with the seasons. Migratory hooded mergansers showed up in October, and would number in the dozens by the new year. They’d start leaving in the spring, and a few stragglers would mingle with newly-arrived wood ducks before heading north. In some years, the wood ducks would nest in the summer. I only remember one year when they stayed into the winter.
This pond has its regular cast of characters, as well as a few guest stars that pop in from time to time, such as loons or green herons. A few years ago, a couple of nonnative domestic geese started swimming with the Canada geese here. Earlier this year, large numbers of black-bellied whistling ducks started coming and going.
Driving by a few weeks ago, I wondered if the domestic geese had suddenly produced a full-grown offspring. Who was this nearly all-white goose with them?
How common are show goose visitors in Tallahassee?
Walking by on a different day, I started to wonder if this was a snow goose. I had heard of them in Tallahassee before, so I looked at my bird guide, and the Cornell All About Birds page for snow geese. I also Googled “Snow Goose Tallahassee” and saw that there had been numerous eBird rare bird alerts for a snow goose at Evans Pond.
There was my answer. But, as usual, I had more questions.
Mostly, I wanted to know how often these birds visited Tallahassee. When someone makes an eBird observation of a snow goose in Tallahassee, it triggers a rare bird alert, but the birds are not rare within their range. Florida, however, is not in their range. And while snow geese migrate south in flocks, eBird observations of snow geese in Tallahassee almost always report a single bird, sometimes two.
Do these individuals get separated from their flocks, perhaps pushed east by a storm? Or are they loners?
I sorted eBird observations over the last ten years to see what else I could learn. People spot about 4-5 a year in Tallahassee, sometimes less, sometimes more. There were no observations in 2019. I tried to account for birds that had been observed for a few days in one location, and then soon after we can see a new set of observations not far away. I was surprised to see a couple of single observations for Evans Pond, in 2017 and 2020. Perhaps they only stayed a day or two before heading to another location.
Chasing rare bird alerts
Looking at eBird data, one thing I’ve noticed is a large jump in the number of snow goose observations, but at roughly the same number of locations. Apps like eBird and iNaturalist have become much more popular in recent years, so more people are making observations. And more people are paying attention to those rare bird alerts.
We learned about rare bird alerts during a recent episode of Coast to Canopy on winter bird watching. That episode is full of tips for people looking to see cool birds in our area. Juli deGrummond, our guest who talked about the alerts, has made several of the snow goose observations for Tallahassee in recent years.
According to those alerts, as of this writing there are a couple of spots where you can currently see a snow goose, or a Ross’s goose, or a greater white fronted goose in Leon County. Tallahassee is a city with no shortage of fresh water bodies. It’s not a bad place for a Kevin McCallister goose that finds itself spending winter away from its family.
Black-bellied whistling ducks- not quite native?
Snow geese are somewhat uncommon visitors, but we can reliably expect that a handful of them end up somewhere in Tallahassee during the colder months. A bigger mystery to me is that of the whistling ducks that started coming to Evans Pond in 2025.
One reason I wonder about this is that we’ve only had two duck species in this pond for as long as I can remember. I admit, though, that I only started paying attention around 2013. The other reason I find their presence notable is that I’ve watched the population near WFSU explode in recent years. I guess what I wonder is, is Tallahassee experiencing large increase in black-bellied whistling ducks?
The answer is yes, and it’s not just Tallahassee.
I started by looking at eBird data, and I did notice observations with larger numbers of whistling ducks in recent years. This is what I noticed at the FSU/ FAMU Engineering School retention pond. Where I had sometimes seen a small flock of the ducks, by 2024 I was seeing dozens of them.
As I dug a little deeper, I found that this species has been rapidly expanding its range for decades. Their historic range was once South America to southern Texas. According to the Florida Ornithological Society and FWC, the ducks arrived here in the late 1960s/ early 1970s. They’ve long been in the peninsula, and more recently have been spreading through the Florida panhandle and as far north as Wisconsin.
One factor driving them north might be warming temperatures. They seem to do well in human-altered areas; Cornell mentions golf courses as places we might find them. While many animal species lose habitat as human populations expand, others can adapt to thrive in agricultural and residential areas.
The effects of a growing population
Evans Pond never stops teaching me about birds. One rare visitor led me to take a closer look at the other birds here, and I ended up with a whole new perspective on a bird I often see.
Now that I know that black-bellied whistling ducks are only recently arrived in our area, I wonder how their growing population will affect other ducks. Whistling ducks eat vegetation such as smartweed, grasses, and sedges. They don’t directly compete with hooded mergansers for food, as mergansers eat small fish, insects, and crustaceans. Wood ducks eat a combination of plants and arthropods. Other lakes and ponds in the area host other migratory ducks and aquatic birds, each with their own diets and habitat requirements.
Whether whistling ducks compete for food directly or not, they influence the food web and make an impact on the habitat. As they expand to new water bodies and increase their overall number, how will they alter the urban landscape here in Tallahassee?
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