August 24, 2013

It’s taken me a lot of years living in north and central Florida to fully appreciate the vastness and diversity of Ocala National Forest.  I first became aware of what a huge tract of undeveloped, relatively pristine habitat it is when I first moved to Florida, to attend grad school in Gainesville.  I’d guess that during the 9 years I lived in Gainesville, I visited the forest maybe a dozen times or thereabouts.  Not much.   I’ve lived in DeLand for a couple of decades, but it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve begun a somewhat concerted effort to comb the forest roads and get to know it a little more intimately.  It’s these recent efforts, kind of nibbling around the edges, that have made me truly grok how much of it there is to see. And I’ve barely scratched the surface.  I’m beginning to get a better feel for the eastern parts of the forest; the Juniper Springs Wilderness, Hopkin’s Prairie, Riverside Island, the Paisley Road and nearby sections of Alexander Springs Wilderness, and so on.  But the northern and western parts of the forest are still pretty much a big black box.

Regenerating scrub with some ancients behind. Forest Road 06

It’s surprising that I’ve spent so little time exploring Ocala National Forest until fairly recently.  In the first couple of years I lived in DeLand, when Terry Farrell and I were going through our young hooligan phase of faculty development, we spent many, many afternoons road-cruising the Paisley Road region, looking for snakes, birds, lizards, insects, cool plants (but only the cool ones; just looking for plants isn’t particularly challenging), and the nearest Kangaroo Mart from which to pick up our next six-pack.  But only for the passenger, because drinking and driving is so wrong.   We made the dubious decision at some point to replace road-cruising and having fun with doing field research on pigmy rattlesnakes, which occupied a significant chunk of our free time for the next decade.   So Paisley Road and all the other enticing destinations in Ocala went on the back burner.

Paisley Road

Even some parts of the forest relatively close to DeLand remained unvisited until recently.  Case in point — Forest Road 06.  This minor forest road is only 5 or 6 miles long, but is divided into a north section and a south section by a stream of variable depth and unknown substrate flowing across the road.  Terry and I cruised the northern section of 06, accessed by taking the Paisley Road about 4 miles north of its intersection with SR42 in Paisley, many times;  I bird there solo once or twice a month during fall and winter.  But I’ve never had the nerve to try to ford the stream.  Up until last year, I’d never investigated the south section of FR06, even though I pass its intersection with State Road 42 all the time when driving to the Paisley area.  When I finally drove this fairly short stretch of well-maintained sand road, I found a delightful variety of habitats there, including some extensive tracts of regenerating scrub still bearing hundreds of snags of the mature sand pines that grew there before it burned sometime in the last few years.  Full of red-headed woodpeckers, flickers, and other woodpeckers as you would expect, but almost apocalyptic in its feel on a gloomy, fog-bound morning.

Sunrise in the scrub graveyard. Forest Road 06

Forest Road 06 and the Paisley area was my destination this morning.  I was hoping to dig up a few migrants, but not really expecting it.  Mostly, it was an exercise to try and hone my bird-spotting skills a bit before my fall term Ornithology class begins in earnest and I have to lead a dozen sharp-eyed kids on bird quests.  If memory serves me correctly (rarely does), when I first began teaching Ornithology it seems like I was always the first to spot distant birds.  In recent years, students have been beating me to the punch on a regular basis.  Maybe it’s not about me at all; perhaps students are more field-competent these days.  Probably not.  Whatever, I want to be on top of how ever much game I have left once the field trips begin.

Scrub with chalky bluestem, Andropogon virginicus var glaucus

Foggy morning.  If I tried really hard I could almost convince myself there was a bit of chill.   Slow-rolling up FR06 a little after sunrise¸ listening to Trampled by Turtles, totally grooving on the melancholy music and somber surroundings.  Experiencing that spiritual recharging I think so many of us feel when we are in nature.  Not much happening with birds, but that’s cool.  It’s the immensity of it, the entire experience.

Eastern towhee, male

I spent some time photographing Carolina wrens and eastern towhees, both species tattered from their ongoing molt. But as a wise photographer (that would be you, Bone) once told me, we take what we’re given.   Scattered along the roadside I saw several clumps of chalky bluestem, Andropogon virginicus.   Beautiful plant – I just noticed it a couple of months ago.   I thought on the first time I saw it that it must be quite uncommon, or I would surely have noticed it before.  My attempts at ID were unproductive; it was identified for me by my Consulting Botanist.  Now that I know what it is, I see it everywhere.  It’s that plant thing again – too many of them, and far too much similarity within some groups.

Eastern towhee female and male

Carolina wren

Carolina wren

A bit further up I spotted a fox squirrel doing its syncopated lope up the roadside, and I slowed down a bit to try and stalk.  He immediately headed up the nearest pine, and for the next 15-20 minutes we played a game of patience.  He picked a comfortable perch and watched me.   My initial intent was to wait until he got tired of waiting in his isolated tree, and photograph him as he descended the trunk, perhaps posing on a picturesque branch or stub on his way down.  My capacity for self-delusion never fails to surprise me.  I can’t sit in one place for longer than five minutes tops if nothing is going on; every time I started the car and eased up the road a bit closer, he climbed higher to a new comfortable perch.  I gave up in less than half an hour. He totally kicked my ass.   I actually felt bad for the little dude – he had really skeevy looking skin lesions at several spots.   Raw, open wounds.  I’m guessing they’re emergence sites of bot fly larvae that have become inflamed after the parasites dropped.  Whatever, they’re pretty gross, and can’t be very comfortable for the little man.

Fox squirrel. A good-looking animal from this angle.

Notice the open lesion on his side.

Seemed comfortable despite his skin issues.

Look at me getting all verklempt about one parasite-ridden fox squirrel, when I shoot gray squirrels in my yard by the boatload.  Go figure.

Chalky bluestem

Chalky bluestem

Winged sumac, Rhus copallina

A syrphid fly in the genus Palpada, feeding on winged sumac flowers

August 8, 2013

Before January of this year, I had only seen red-cockaded woodpeckers on a handful of occasions. Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, Appalachicola National Forest, Withlacoochee State Forest – all relatively brief, distant sightings, all over a decade ago.  The species had developed for me a kind of mystique – a notion that these birds were elusive, aloof and difficult to observe.  I had read of field trips organized by birding festivals in central Florida to show birders this species, and they usually involved being in the field before sunrise, stationing the group near a nest cluster where the clan was roosting in old nest cavities, to catch the birds emerging from their overnight shelter before they began their extensive wanderings for the day.  I’m not one who enjoys birding with groups – to me it is best enjoyed by myself or with one or two friends.  I had mostly given up the idea of seeing or photographing red-cockadeds as a realistic goal.

Young barred owl hunting alongside SR19 in Ocala National Forest.

In January I visited the Riverside Island tract of Ocala National Forest for the first time, prompted by Bill Pranty’s description of the red-cockaded nesting population there in his essential book, A Birder’s Guide to Florida .  All of my misimpressions about these fascinating little woodpeckers were exploded that morning.  I’ve been back to that site three times since, and on each occasion have had crippling views of not just the birds, but have also been fortunate enough to watch at some length the antics of these high-spirited birds as they wend their way through the forest like a traveling circus.  They are like no other woodpecker I’ve seen.

Disturbed sandhills habitat, dominated by turkey oak (Quercus laevis).

Yesterday, my friend and naturalist extraordinaire John Serrao and I returned to Riverside Island, and once again were treated to the spectacle of red-cockaded woodpeckers.  As you travel north on Forest Road 11, you pass through several variants of sandhills, one of the favored habitats of RCWOs.  Some areas, recently planted with new longleaf pine after harvest in the fairly recent past, are like pine plantations anywhere – uniform, ordered and relatively uninteresting.  Others have few or no longleaf pines, and are dominated by scattered turkey oaks, some quite impressive.  The typical nesting habitat of red-cockaded woodpeckers though, is the more mature tracts of sandhills, featuring large longleaf pines with an open understory and ground cover comprising wiregrass and other herbaceous flora.  The red-cockaded nest cavity trees, which tend to occur in clusters, are marked by the forest service with bands of white paint at their base.   There are numerous such nest tree clusters visible from FR11 in the Riverside Island tract.  It is in those areas where I’ve seen the woodpeckers in the past.

Sandhills habitat with longleaf pines.

Thursday was one of those mornings that challenged my assertion that summer birding in Florida tends to be relatively boring; the summer doldrums strike birders everywhere, but are particularly noticeable in Florida with its relatively low breeding bird diversity.   On our drive north on SR19, we passed a young barred owl hunting the roadside from a large Forest Service sign cautioning hunters to be careful with firearms and fire.  This patient bird didn’t mind a couple of crazed photographers on the opposite side of the road capturing photons at a frantic pace, nor the big logging trucks that regularly roared by like locomotives.    He even dropped to the ground once while we were watching in an unsuccessful stoop, but returned to a new perch at the forest’s edge to resume his hunt.  He was still there when we drove off.  Traveling up FR11, once we had left the scrub habitat and passed into the turkey oak savannah, we saw in relatively short order a very tolerant red-tailed hawk juvie hunting from a skeletal turkey oak snag, a less congenial American kestrel warping away from us, and WOODPECKERS.  We began seeing red-headed woodpeckers regularly, and at one point stopped to photograph one that had flown into a picturesque pine snag right by the road.   Another red-head was nearby, calling back and forth with our target bird.

Red-headed woodpecker

Quarrelsome red-headed woodpeckers

It was while we were working the red-heads that we first heard the traveling circus.  Red-cockaded woodpeckers, at least on all of the occasions I’ve seen them at Riverside, are incredibly vocal birds when they are foraging as a clan.  We heard the sputters and twitters of the clan in the distance, well before we saw them.    They headed in our direction, and in short order we were amidst a flock of at least 6 birds that maintained their nearly constant vocalizations and frenetic activity for the 15 minutes or so they stayed in the area.   The sociality of these birds is completely unlike any other woodpecker I’ve seen.  I commonly see other species traveling in pairs,  including flickers, pileateds, red-bellieds and downys.   Around my feeders at home, I sometimes get family groups of red-bellieds visiting early in the summer, with at times 2 or 3 fledglings following and harassing the parents.  In the red-bellieds, however, the patience of the parents for their fitness units is limited.  After a relatively brief time, the interaction between parents and offspring turns from nurturing to antagonism, with the adults attempting, with considerable resistance from the kids, to drive their offspring away.

Red-cockaded woodpecker

Red-cockaded woodpecker

Not so with the red-cockadeds.  They define family values.  The clan travels as an organized unit, moving in a coordinated fashion with nearly constant vocal signaling among clan members.  Especially curious to me is their wing-flash behavior.   Fairly frequently, individuals who have just landed will hold their wings extended directly above their back for just a split-second.  Clearly this is a signal or form of communication between flock members, but I have no idea what exactly is being communicated.  Nonetheless, it is a distinctive and delightful display.

Part of the clan.

Red-cockaded woodpeckers

The wing flash.

While we were watching the red-cockaded clan, they were joined in the immediate area by a pileated woodpecker and a pair of downy woodpeckers.   If we could have added a flicker and a hairy woodpecker or two, we would have run the table on Florida’s breeding woodpeckers from one spot.  Something to hope for, but it seems unlikely.  While flickers are local and not always easily found, they are widespread, and common around the Riverside area.  Hairy woodpeckers, however, have become my remaining Florida picid nemesis.  I can’t find those birds to save my soul.