Birding at the Edge

Explore the Great Florida Birding Trail in Northwest Florida.

Rachel Dickinson
photography by Beth Maynor Young

SweetTea Journal (Fall/Winter 2006) – “I hear a blue-gray gnatcatcher,” Selena Kiser said as she stopped and pointed toward an oak tree about twenty yards away. “And there’s the buzzy chatter of a kinglet.”  We quickly raised our binoculars to our eyes and began scanning for the two birds in the branches of the oak. About two-thirds of the way up, we noticed a lot of activity as several birds flitted from branch to branch. I locked in on an olive-gray bird with white-and-black bars on its wings that was nervously moving among the branches. Seee-seee-seee. It buzzed like an insect. Try as I might, I couldn’t see any distinguishable markings on its head, so I didn’t know whether it was a ruby-crowned or golden-crowned kinglet.

I was standing with Selena and her husband, Mark Kiser, at the edge of a wooded area in the J.R. Alford Greenway, a county park tucked in the outskirts of  Tallahassee. It was dawn, and the sun was just pushing against the horizon on what promised to be a beautiful early morning. With backpacks filled with water, bird field guides, and cameras, as well as binoculars around our necks, we headed across a large mowed field toward a line of trees. We had the entire park to ourselves and couldn’t wait to check out the unmowed fields separated by narrow strips of trees. The park promised a great mix of habitats—fields for foraging sparrows and open hunting areas for hawks; the edge where trees meet the meadow for wrens and kinglets and warblers; and finally, some more mature forestland for woodpeckers. I got excited just thinking about the birding possibilities that lay ahead.

Birding (the modern term for bird-watching) means big business and big bucks. In Florida, birding supports more than nineteen thousand jobs in the state, and retail sales related to birding top $477 million annually. Big events, such as the Florida Panhandle Birding and Wildflower Festival held in Port St. Joe in early October, only add to the allure. All that is to say birders love Florida because Florida has great birds. In fact, it’s the number-one destination for wildlife viewing in the United States, and the only thing the visitors who come here need to know is where to go to see the birds. Several years ago, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission began developing a birding trail—a self-guided driving tour that points people to bird habitats. And the commission hopes it will be as successful as in Texas, where local communities along the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail are reaping the economic benefits of having birders come to town.

Mark works for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and is the coordinator for the Great Florida Birding Trail. So when he and Selena offered to show me some of the cool birding sites around Tallahassee, I jumped at the chance. They are both hard-core birders, and I knew I was in for a full day when they said they’d pick me up before dawn so we could be out in the field as the sun rose. Selena has a great ear for birdcalls and birdsongs. If you’re a good “ear birder,” you can pinpoint birds by sound, and then zero in on them with your binoculars. When Selena hears a bird—a seee or a zeee or a churrr—she usually can tell you what kind it is.

Hard-core birders make lists of how many birds they’ve seen and where they have seen them. There are life lists, state lists, regional lists, and continent-wide lists. Some birders participate in a Big Day (how many bird species you can see in a particular place over 24 hours) or a Big Year (how many species you can see in one continent over 365 days). I call this “combat birding”—scopes and binoculars aimed and ready to tick off yet another species. I tease my husband—a hard-core birder himself—that it’s like a mental illness, although I don’t believe it has been listed in the diagnostic manual yet.

Birding in Northwest Florida is a rare treat for such serious birders. The habitat ranges from coastline to marshes to bottomland forests to meadows to freshwater lakes and ponds to upland forests. Different habitats support different species of birds, so birding in Northwest Florida where birding spots are relatively close together is like being a kid in a candy shop. The Great Florida Birding Trail identifies seventy-eight birding sites in the Panhandle Section, and the brochure lists brief descriptions of each site, gives directions (very important), lists hours and contact information, and lets you know the kinds of services (such as bathrooms—also very important) you’re likely to find. For those interested in birding in Florida, the trail is the place to start.

I began making my bird list at the J.R. Alford Greenway, but had a hard time writing as fast as Mark and Selena were hearing and seeing the birds. Now that the sun was up, the birds were getting really active. “Goldfinch, pine warbler, tufted titmouse in the pine up ahead,” Mark said. “I’m hearing a pileated woodpecker and a red-bellied woodpecker coming from the woods,” Selena said.

“What’s the big bird in the tree way over there?” I asked.

“Good spot,” Mark said. He was being kind. It was a bald eagle (a-hem), our nation’s symbol. Right then, three wood storks flew over, and I got so excited I nearly dropped my binoculars. “Look, look! It’s a …” “Wood stork,” Selena answered for me.
By the time we left the greenway, we had seen more than fifty species of birds and had witnessed a courtship between two ospreys in which the male showed off for the female by waving a big fish in front of her face. A bird version of bringing home the bacon. And I also learned what a fire anthill was—a cruel trick of nature!

In the afternoon we drove thirty miles south of  Tallahassee to St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, one of the premier birding spots in Florida. Stopping at the visitors center, we quickly scanned the pond and immediately picked up a great egret and an eight-foot-long alligator to add to the day’s list. The refuge is crisscrossed with levees and ponds and cool estuarine habitat that culminate in a bay. A picturesque lighthouse stands guard where the road ends. Birding in the forest of magnolias, pines, and palms that led up to the ponds, we spotted some great species, including a black-and-white warbler. But the pay dirt was looking at the shorebirds and ducks in the ponds. Holy smokes.

Birds of all different sizes, shapes, and colors were wading, swimming, lounging, and loitering on the water’s edge. A pond was buzzing with dozens of tree swallows feeding on insects near the surface while a couple of female anhingas sat on branches, spread their wings, and struck prehistoric poses. Big birds and little birds, alone and in groups, swam in the pond by the lighthouse. Three gull species—laughing, ring-billed, and herring—sat on pilings in the bay, providing the perfect opportunity for comparison. Seeing and trying to identify so many different kinds of birds made me slip into sensory overload, like a kid who eats one too many pieces of candy and gets caught in the grip of a sugary high.

While we scanned one of the marshy areas with a scope set on a tripod, Mark spotted a black-necked stilt and had to look twice because that bird was not supposed to be there this time of year. While we all “oohed” and “aahed” over the bird, a British man came up and wanted to know what we had. He took a look, and then told us he’d just seen a red-throated loon, another out-of-place bird, in the lighthouse pond. Mark looked at me because he knew I was anxious to see a brown-headed nuthatch, and I just said, “Go for it.”

This is what birding is all about. It’s not predictable. The birds don’t sit still or stay in one place guaranteeing you’ll be able to see them. They don’t show up in an area on schedule or leave when they’re supposed to. And some of them get way off course and end up thousands of miles from home. It used to be that you had to phone a birding hotline to find out what rare birds were in the area, but today most of the birding communities are tied into each other and communicate via Internet. That doesn’t mean you’ll find out where all the good birds are, because birders also tend to be a bit possessive of their good finds. That’s when people like me turn to a birding guide—someone who knows the ins and outs of a region. Someone who knows where to find the birds.

To this end, Mark and Selena hooked me up with Alan Knothe from Apalachicola. Mark, Selena, and I had walked for ten miles—literally—at the J.R. Alford Greenway and St. Marks, so I was afraid of what a day with Knothe might do to me since birding guides tend to be the hard-core of the hard-core. An education and training specialist with Apalachicola National Estuarine Research Reserve, Knothe grew up in Fort Walton and has been chasing Florida birds for decades. He is also putting the finishing touches on his birding guidebook to Northwest Florida. I told him I wanted to see some of the spots on the birding trail that were away from the coast. He told me that many people overlook the inland birding sites because the coast has such phenomenal birding, but those people are missing out on some beautiful habitat.

Knothe picked me up before dawn, and we headed north and west from Tallahassee. A quick look at him made my calf muscles relax a little because we were roughly contemporaries, and I didn’t think he’d try to run me ragged. An hour later, we were so far north in Florida that Georgia was a stone’s throw away. Ahead lay the entrance to Three Rivers State Park, but Knothe blasted past. “I just want to check out the meadow in Apalachee Wildlife Management Area to look for sparrows,” he said.

It was overcast and humid, and although we didn’t know it at the time, we were experiencing the last dry moments of the day. We got out of the truck, and Knothe immediately heard a fussing noise at the edge of the meadow. “I think it’s a wren,” he said. I was hoping for a winter wren, a little bird that I’ve never seen. No such luck, as a house wren with a perky tail popped into view. We moved through the meadow, avoiding the prodigious fire anthills, and headed toward the edge, where the field meets a mature stand of hardwoods. Birding at the edge is getting the best of both worlds—you get the meadow species and the forest species.

I was feeling pretty confident after my day with the Kisers, but was soon mortified when I said, after hearing a distant bird scream, “red-tailed hawk,” to which Knothe replied, “No, that’s a blue jay.”

Knothe said Northwest Florida has half of all the insectivorous plants—like the pitcher plant, which traps insects with its leaves—in the world. He also said that only Texas has more species of turtles than Florida. A fountain of natural-history knowledge, he delivered these tidbits between pointing out an eastern towhee, an orange-crowned warbler, a Carolina wren, a common yellowthroat, a blue-gray gnatcatcher, a phoebe, and numerous song sparrows.

Heading back to Three Rivers, we scanned the ponds on both sides of the road and picked up some good waterfowl. I was starting to feel as if I were trapped in a Dr. Seuss book—instead of “one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish,” I was hearing “ruddy duck, black duck, mallard duck.” We also saw two Canada geese, and one of them looked much larger than the other, causing Knothe to pull out his field guide and ponder whether we might be looking at a different race within the species. Pretty extreme, I thought.

Three Rivers State Park overlooks Lake Seminole. As we drove through an expansive forest of slash pine with an open understory, we heard several species of woodpeckers calling and drumming on the pines. We lifted our binoculars to scan the lake, which was getting choppy as the wind picked up, and then it began to thunder. That didn’t stop us because we were hard-core. We birded around a picnic area and managed to see a white-breasted nuthatch (another bird that was not supposed to be around yet), a pine warbler, another black-and-white warbler, and more woodpeckers (red-bellied, downy, and pileated). By now the sky was beginning to pour great buckets of water, but hard-core birders aren’t distracted by a little moisture.

Hoping it would let up, we headed out to Florida Caverns State Park, one of a series of parks developed by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the 1930s. To get to the visitors center, you drive through a primeval-looking bottomland forest filled with magnolia, oak, cypress, bay, sweet gum, and buckeye—perfect habitat for barred owls, woodpeckers, and different kinds of warblers during breeding season. We heard a barred owl call, “Who cooks for you all?” in the distance, and Knothe tried to lure it in closer by calling back. We think we heard the owl laughing in response.

The walk along the Floodplain Trail brought more kinglets, chickadees, another black-and-white warbler, and woodpeckers. We saw lichen-covered limestone outcrops, blocked cave entrances, and beautiful woodland flowers, and the trail stayed well above the swollen river that encircled the trunks of cypress and sweet gum trees. Two pileated woodpeckers worked on the rain-softened bark of a cypress, easily ripping off strips of bark by working their powerful bills along the trunk.

It was hard to leave Florida Caverns because we felt as if we were wandering through a landscape that time forgot—as if we might see an apatosaurus raise its head in a distant swamp—but I wanted to make one last stop at Torreya State Park.

One of those parks that almost don’t look worth the trouble to get there, Torreya seems too complicated to reach from I-10, but the way is well marked by little brown state park signs. Torreya is named for the extremely rare Florida Torreya tree, which was discovered on that site in 1835.

At the end of the park drive is the Gregory House, a gorgeous white Greek Revival mansion positioned on a bluff overlooking the Apalachicola River. This bluff was the site of Confederate gun encampments during the Civil War. As we stood on the lawn, it was absolutely quiet except for the sounds of the wind rustling through the hardwood forest. Rain was falling softly, mist was gathering like wisps of cotton on the river, and it was silent.

As I stood and looked toward the river, I remembered hearing a report that an ivory-billed woodpecker—the possibly extinct bird that may have been rediscovered in Arkansas recently—was spotted along the Apalachicola in 2003. The habitat looked perfect, and I squinted and tried to will one to fly past me, but it didn’t happen. Yet that’s what birding is all about, I suppose—the possibilities.

Soon we heard little chips and cheeps coming from the edge of the forest, and then saw chickadees, palm warblers, and pine warblers in the low branches, and a whole flock of chipping sparrows moving through the brushy understory. The beauty of the woods, the river, and the white house on the bluff provided stark contrast with the little fussing birds in front of us, and I had to laugh.

We had finally burned our daylight. Driving back to Tallahassee in a downpour, I realized that the Great Florida Birding Trail wasn’t only about finding birds, it was about discovering great natural places—places some of us might never visit if they weren’t linked on a map. Parks such as Torreya, Three Rivers, and St. Marks are beautiful natural areas that offer trails for walking and benches for sitting and enjoying stunning vistas that seem to continually reveal themselves. These entwined systems of habitat and animal life add a richness and texture to Northwest Florida that you won’t otherwise discover if you never get off the highways that cross the state. You certainly don’t have to be a birder to enjoy a pretty spot, but if you open your eyes and your ears and occasionally look up, you might find yourself wanting to know more about all those cheeps and twitters in the treetops.