SEANET surveys begin

Eek! sorry about being absent. It is a crazy time. We are pulling together all the plans for the Georgia's Colonial Coast Birding and Nature Festival. The booklet will go to the printers in just a few weeks. Well anyway, I have been busy doing a breeding bird survey down in Camden County and plover surveys up here on Jekyll Island. Strong storms a couple of weeks ago really did some damage to the nesting Wood Storks and Wilson's Plovers. Sad to see but this is nature's way of balancing.

Wood Storks in happier times before the storms.

June 2, 2009 Georgia Graves and I met at Gould Inlet on East Beach, St. Simons Island. This is going to be the site where we will be doing regular SEANET surveys. We met at about two hours after high tide. Georgia knows this beach better than I do so I listened to her advice. Yes, I live on St. Simons about two miles away from this area but it is a people beach. I used to walk my dog on leash here. What stopped me was Hart, my Australian Shepherd, was not a friendly dog. A lot of the dogs on this beach were running loose. These dogs often would run right up to him. I just gave up coming. Now that is exactly why I volunteered to do this survey here.

The Georgia Sea Turtle Center and Jekyll 4-H are covering the beach on Jekyll. Jekyll beaches are a good balance of people and birds. Yes, there are dogs that run the beach but there are eleven miles of beaches on Jekyll. There are only about three or four miles on St. Simons. It will be interesting to compare the two beaches. Also there are other Georgia beaches that are a lot less public that are going to be covered in this SEANET program. When it all comes together, will it give us a picture of how people and domesticated animals effect the birds?

I enjoy questions like this. Comparing the beaches will give clues to find an answer.

This East Beach area is now defined. Here is what it looks like:

This is looking toward the southeast from the old coastguard station

This is in the same spot just turned around and heading north. It is the start of our survey

This is mid survey area looking northwest over the dunes.

This photo was taken from the same spot but looking northeast

You can see this is a very wide beach at low tide. We will try to do this survey when the tide is high and falling. There exposed beach will be narrower and easier to survey.

It will be fun!

On Monday April 27, I posted about the horseshoe crabs laying eggs. Thursday May 7th I was out on my Thursday Morning Bird Ramble and watched in fascination as shorebirds feasted on these eggs.

Here are a bunch of Sanderling.

There were lines of Sanderlings, Dunlins, Willets, Ruddy Turnstones and a few Red Knots.

This is a Sanderling with three Dunlins Here a Red Knot enjoying the group.

They would crowd around and eat, then they would all run to the water edge splash around then run back to continue feasting. What a sight!

Happy Earth Day

Time is flying by for me. On Saturday morning, I helped Glynn Art Association with a children’s art project. My station was printmaking. I had the children draw something on a soft plate then we printed it. One child drew a cardinal. A boy drew a great bat picture. It was good to know that there are some children enjoying nature. In the afternoon, I did a bird walk, or as I call it a Bird Amble, for the Mother Nature Day Festival on Jekyll Island. This was the second year the Georgia Sea Turtle Center put this festival together. This year the Jekyll Island Authority helped.

Larissa Harris is the Assistant Director of Marketing for JIA. She is on the left. She helped me get started blogging. Beth Burnsed is the event coordinator for Jekyll Island Authority. She is going to help with the Georgia Colonial Coast Birding and Nature Festival in October.

The date for the festival is October 8-12, 2009

There were families out all over Jekyll. I took a small group over to the Amphitheater. This is one of those magical places. It is an old outdoor theater. Behind the theater is a freshwater lake. The lake is a favor hangout for all kinds of egrets and herons.

Did I mention that the Wood Storks are nesting there? These birds are fascinating to watch. I enjoy watching as folks discover them for the first time. The wonder on their faces is worth a million bucks.

Sunday afternoon find

On Sunday, I met a group of parents with their young children for a walk at East Beach on St. Simons Island. It was a beautiful afternoon. The children were having a blast. We discovered a few cannonball jellyfish

but the fascinating find was a small pair of wings with orange stubby legs and feet attached. There was aluminum band on one of the legs. I took the band and told them I would let them know about the bird. Not too many years back, I would have written a letter with the banded number then mailed it to the bird banding lab and waited .

Here we are talking about the find on the beach.

We now live in the 21st century and it is so easy to find out about the bird from the band.
Just go to the bird banding website. Click on Report a bird band and follow the directions. In less than fifteen minutes I knew that the bird was a Forester’s Tern. It was banded in Wisconsin on June 19, 2006. I sent the information on to a couple of the families. One family got out the map and found Wisconsin. They got to see how far this one bird had traveled. Wow! How cool is that!

Friday was a little warmer

On Friday, it began to warm up just in time for the annual Weekend for Wildlife.
This is a weekend put on by our Georgia’s Department of Nature Resources, Wildlife Division Nongame program. This state group watches over our Painted Buntings, shorebirds as well as other migratory birds and animals. The Georgia car tag with a Bald Eagle or hummingbird is one funding source. The other funding source is the great weekend. The Environmental Resources Network, TERN for short, helps puts on the event at Sea Island’s Cloister Resort. I enjoy being part of the weekend by contributing art for auction and by helping lead a Friday birdwatching outing. This year we had a nice size group.
The first bird we all watched was a Piping Plover but a Bald eagle stole the show. This bird landed on the beach scattering the Double-crested Cormorants, gulls and shorebirds.

We finished the day at the Jekyll amphitheater looking at the collection of egrets, herons and even an alligator. It has warmed up!

Back home back at work

Back at home. Jekyll and the Golden Isles have been shrouded in fog and rain. On Tuesday, I went to explore a new birding path on Jekyll. Well, it is not really new. It used to be the best place to watch feeding shorebirds. Today the marsh is reclaiming it and I wonder if it is still has the same value to the birds.The tide was going out. These birds are following a school of fish out to the river.

It was fascinating to watch as the birds scramble for the best place.

EEK! Life is a blur

EEK! Sorry about being so quiet. Life has been a blur of birding, surveys and art. I've been working on a couple of new etchings for the Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival January 21-25. If you are down there, please stop by my Artworks by Lydia booth and say hello.

Now what we did today. Birding!

The weather forecast scared me. It was supposed to be bone-chilling cold so I put on triple layers. The surprise was it was not that bad. In fact it was a beautiful day starting at 39 degrees and by noon it was 60 degrees.

The interesting part of the morning was what we found on Glory Beach (southeast side of Jekyll Island.) There was a HUGE number of cannonball jelly fish washed up. See!

The Dunlins, Ruddy Turnstones, Willets and gulls were on beach clean up patron. Fascinating.

Interesting birds on Jekyll

Amphitheater pond on Jekyll Island

Thursdays are just fun. I get to explore Jekyll Island. Finding interesting birds is a bonus. Well this Thursday, I found a bird species that is an old friend which I don't see much any more. Years ago I volunteered at California's Point Reyes Bird Observatory for three months. What an experience! I learned to band birds and how to do surveys. One of the surveys was monitoring the house flock of White-crowned Sparrows. The birds were color banded so they had names and we knew their history. It was eye opening to find out about these birds from the notes we had on them. It changed the way I looked at birds. So on Thursday when one popped up on a branch near the dunes, I was thrilled. We follow the bird for a while. I tried to take some pictures but the bird did a good job of staying just out of range.

The White-crowned Sparrow is there you just have to look sorry about that.

Toward the end of the morning it was getting quite warm. In fact, we set a new high for the day. Anyway we were looking at all the night-herons roosting around the Amphitheater pond when I spotted a Roseate Spoonbill. This is the third year that this species has been on Jekyll in December. Will it winter here? I will keep you posted.

This is a picture taken back in January 2008. The bird was in the exact same place on Thursday.

Follow up on Shorebirds feeding frenzy

Those shorebirds were really chowing down on whatever. I just couldn't let it go so I emailed Brad Winn our DNR Wildlife Resource Division senior biologist. He has been studying shorebirds on our coast. He had seen a few of these frenzy flocks of shorebirds recently. When he dug around to see what they were after it turned out to be polychaete worms. They must be tasty the way those birds were practically standing on their heads to get to them.

Lawn Chair Birding October

Well, it was a little chilly Monday evening but Coastal Georgia Audubon members met at Gould's Inlet for a little birding. This time we were watching gulls, terns, shorebirds, wading birds. A couple of artists added a little charm to the afternoon.

After the birding some of us went over to hear about Amercian Oystercatchers in Georgia. Brad Winn, Gerogia Department of Nature Resource Coastal Resources Division, and Terry Norton, Director of the Georgia Sea Turtle Center were talking about the research being conducted here on Amercian Oystercatchers. It was fascinating to learn about these birds which are found all year on the Georgia coast.

Here is a drawing I am working on. No surprise it is a study of American Oystercatchers.

Lastly here is a list of the thirty-five species we saw at Gould's Inlet from 5 pm to 6:30 pm

Double-crested Cormorant, Brown Pelican, Reddish Egret, Tricolored Heron, Great Blue Heron, Great Egret, White Ibis, Wood Stork, Osprey, American Kestrel, Willet, Ruddy Turnstone, Short-billed Dowitcher, Sanderling, Western Sandpiper, Least Sandpiper, Dunlin, Black-bellied Plover, Semipalmated Plover, Piping Plover, Ring-billed Gull, Great Black-backed Gull, Herring Gull, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Laughing Gull, Caspian Tern. Royal Tern, Sandwich Tern, Forster's Tern, Black Skimmer, Eurasian Collared-Dove, Tree Swallow, Palm Warbler, Song Sparrow, Boat-tailed Grackle,

If you are in the area next Tuesday, we are meeting at 3 pm at the new viewing platform at the Jekyll Island Welcome Center for another Lawn Chair Birding event.

Wow that was a fun festival

Hello everyone, It has been over a week since the Georgia's Colonial Coast Birding and Nature Festival. It was a roller coaster ride for me.
All in all everyone had a good time. Here is Ben Lizdas two blog entries about his expenience. Thanks Ben for the great blog.
http://600birds.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-photos-from-jekyll-island-ga.html

http://600birds.blogspot.com/2008/10/king-rail.html

June 5th Harris Neck

June 5th, 2007. Today we had our monthly festival meeting at Harris Neck. Attending the meeting was Beth, Regi, Harriet, Gene, Pat and Dot, and, of course, me. As far as I was concerned, this meeting could be long or I could keep it short and sweet. So when Gene announced that he had to leave at noon, I knew "short" was it! We worked on details for the Colonial Coast Birding Challenge: basically, the “Challenge” is a Big Day held before the festival. We decided to have people choose a day from October 5 through October 12 to find as many birds as they could on any or all the Colonial Coast Birding Trail sites in a twenty four hour period. The real change this year was a monetary prize for the winner! It took a while but we finally came up with a plan, and the meeting was over! Gene took off, after which the rest of us stood around tying up loose ends. A birding festival takes a great deal of planning: we give ourselves eighteen months to get the plans laid out for this three day festival.

All the chatter ended abruptly with the announcement that someone had found two Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks! Cars were loaded, and we zipped up to the dike at Woody Pond, only to find a pair of non-birders looking for alligators. They had no clue that they had flushed a rare bird! Oh, well.... There was still a lot to look at: Wood Storks with chicks, Anhinga chicks, egrets, herons, night-herons, and ibis were spread across the pond. The air was filled with the calls of the moorhens; those calls sound like the beginning of the song “Wipe Out” to me...

Scanning with my scope I spotted a small group of nesting White Ibis. I did an etching a while back of White Ibis nesting at Harris Neck, but I felt it was a bit heavy on the greens and reds. Well, today I saw that etching come to life: there they were, tucked into those trees that were a little too green and a little too red!

Thanks to Bob Churi for allowing me to use his photo of whistling-ducks.

With Georgia coastal birdlife on my mind--good birding!
Lydia