Coral City, Florida

While at Ding Darling on Tuesday, the first encounter with a fellow birder was a gentleman from Michigan who told us about the Burrowing Owls he had seen that morning. He was happy to show us photos on his digital camera and told us he had been up at dawn for two days looking for them and was successful on the second attempt. He vaguely said they were "north of here" sort of waving with his hand in that direction. He explained how the owls burrow in lawns right in the city, and that we should look for "little mounds of white sand" which they throw up as they burrow.

After we got home, Maria started researching and discovered the city was Coral City, just north of Ft. Myers, and that there are several hundred owl pairs and that one generally "just drives around neighborhoods and looks for small roped off areas" and oftentimes also a small wooden cross which the owls use for perching. I found a map with some specific locations and one site was at the library.

So off we went on Wednesday mornig, although not at daybreak as we found out that Burrowing Owls are not particuarly nocturnal and can be seen during the day.

I had my iPhone and we were headed for the library, following the moving blue circle. We turned off a busy street and Maria started slowly driving the 7 or 8 block to the library while I kept looking down the cross streets as we were now in a quiet, middle-class residential neighborhood. Right away, I saw a roped-off area so we went around the block and to check it out, and within 10 seconds of stopping the car, we saw an owl! It was incredible; we totally didn't expect to drive right up to an owl with barely any searching. I don't think we even really expected to find one.

One of our favorite people who writes about birds (Pete Dunne) says Burrowing Owls are like "potatoes on legs." We couldn't see the legs but it was brownish and speckled and stared back at us with bright yellow eyes and white markings on a light-brown face. It stood nearly motionless in its little area which was scruffy and weedy with a makeshift string fence around it. It was adorable. A man and woman walked by and told us about another burrow nearby, so we drove around a few blocks and actually found several although only one had visible owls. Yes, plural! There were two of them at that spot, which was on a front lawn with lawn chairs 15 to 20 feet away. We thought this whole deal was quite a phenomenon, especially since Burrowing Owls usually use already excavated burrows like those of prairie dogs. Why this population has settled in Coral City, Florida? Who knows....Some of the sites also had small signs on a post about respecting the owls' habitat.

And we also spotted two Loggerhead Shrikes on telephone wires in the same neighborhood, a life bird for Maria.

We got back home at 9:30, exactly when Maria told Richard (who opted out of this excursion) we would be back.

We walked the beach and then mostly rested up from all our strenuous birding of the past few days. And read and lounged about. Richard and I walked across the street to the library's secondhand book store, which was nicer on the outside than in, but I can always find a book (actually I bought three).

After another simply lovely sunset (this time of year, setting right at the end of Captiva Island), we sat down to a tasty chicken/vegie stir fry that Maria made.

And then ate ice-cream and fell asleep during the debate...at least I did.