Birding festival at the Shrimp and Grits Festival

Last week was a blur. I was preparing to set up a booth at the Jekyll Island’s Shrimp and Grits Festival. Here is the booth. One of my goals for this Georgia birding festival is to involve the surrounding communities in our Seventh Annual Georgia’s Colonial Coast Birding and Nature Festival. On Friday, I put the booth up. I settled in for the weekend.
What a weekend it was! Friday night, Coastal Georgia Audubon members Jimmie Ann, Janice, Barbara and Carole came by. They brought me some shrimp & grits. Thanks you guys.
Man, was that good.

Saturday Janie Smith of Wild Birds Unlimited came to help me. She brought our store mascot, Jay B. Watcher. He was the showman. Everyone smiled at him. A few gave him a hug. We talked to people from all over the place. There were festival booklets and posters to pass out. Children got a flier and a shell to remind them to come to festival’s Nature Day Saturday October 10. The next three and half weeks are going to be wild. Come see us at the Seventh Annual Georgia’s Colonial Coast Birding and Nature Festival October 8-12,2009.

Red Knots

These days, I am working with a great team of folks to pull together the details of our annual Georgia's Colonial Coast Birding and Nature Festival October 8-12. My goal is to share some of the special places on our coast. In that spirit here is a post from Brad Winn. He is the Senior Biologist for GA Department of Natural Resources studying shorebirds on the GA coast.
Thanks Brad for the work that you do and thanks for sharing this information and these great photos. These are four Red Knots in flight.
Since 1996 GA Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Resources Divison, Nongame Program has been documenting red knot use of the Altamaha River mouth during a late summer and early fall staging event there. This year the number of knots appears to be up slightly from the last several years. Tim Keyes, Stacia Hendricks, and I had about 2,500 knots feeding on the mud banks of Wolf Island NWR on September 1. ( Here is part of this flock of knots.)
We will end up with more than 100 individual band codes from those bird. This flock will spend the winter in the SE US after dispersing from the Altamaha later this month. High counts in 2000 and 2001 were approaching 12,000 knots. The Western Atlantic knot population has been tanking.
We are lucky to have these birds staging in GA. Let's keep the Altamaha waters flowing and clean to maintain the health of the food for these birds on our coast. (Lydia's comment: Counting these birds must have been a challenge. Look at the flock!)

Spoonbills

I just have to share this picture sent to me by Ame a Jekyll Island resident.

It is just one of those quiet scenes that is becoming more common along the Georgia Coast. One report had 91 spoonbills at a roost on US 17 south of Jekyll Island. Even as it is more and more common, there is just something about pink birds.

Last Golf Cart Nature Tour

Friday was the last Golf Cart Nature Tour on Jekyll Island's golf courses for the summer. It has been so much fun to ride in a golf cart to look at the beauty of nature. Here is a picture of the group looking at the Amphitheater pond. I hope we can schedule some more of these tours.