The Blue Heron Wetlands is a gift from the city of Titusville's waste treatment facility to the birds and birding community, "designed so that any effluent that is not utilized in the reclaimed water distribution system can be diverted to the wetland area." Sweetwater Wetlands in Tucson was the same type of birding venue.
When I got there, a group of 20 birders was leaving and the leader (the man with a scope) was instructing: "What are you seeing?" "Is it flying in a dihedral?" "Do you see white anywhere?"
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| Cattle Egret at Blue Heron Wetlands - Titusville, FL |
Merritt Island NWR is one of the stars in the refuge system which is certainly part of the reason the Space Coast Bird and Wildlife Festival is held there.
WWW.NBBD.COM (The Merritt Island Adventure published on 11/17/2014)
This video is a documentary of the lives of the homesteaders living on Merritt Island in Florida in the area that is now owned by NASA operating the Kennedy Space Center and also managed as Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. NASA used eminent domain to acquire the property in the late 1950's - 60's. Here are the stories of how people lived very primitively on the land and what happened when they were forced to move. For this film, they were brought back to the homestead, back to the very foundations where they still existed. Some early settlers are able to visit their home sites where the land is open to the public; however, some have never had access to their home site because it lies within the security area of Kennedy Space Center. Many residents are proud that their land went to support a successful space program that sent man to the moon! Although residents were forced to move, they are glad the land is protected as a National Wildlife Refuge and not developed like so much of the Florida coastline. The refuge remains pristine and very similar to how they remembered growing up there.
The words "eminent domain" always have a back story, and Merritt Island is a fairly recent acquisition. It is a broad barrier island that bumps out into the Atlantic halfway up the coast of Florida, with the John F. Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral on the south and Canaveral National Seashore on the north. The causeway from Titusville goes directly into the refuge. I first headed for Black Point Wildlife Drive, at the entrance of which was a minor bird jam, as there were at least 100 egrets, herons and ibises. And most of the rest of the seven-mile route was nearly as productive with ample pull-offs or room for cars to pass. Thousands of ducks and grebes, a few mergansers, cormorants, occasional shorebirds, raptors overhead, Roseate Spoonbills, Wood Storks...
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| Reddish Egret - Merritt NWR - FL |
My mission at Merritt was to see a Florida Scrub Jay so after leaving the auto route, I went to the Scrub Ridge Trail and walked the mile loop. A couple just ahead of me saw a SJ, "for just a second," but I didn't. Shucks. I even back-tracked to where he saw it, willing for it to show, but with no success. This was one of two trails where the Scrub Jay is "common" as the habitat is just right. The other frustrating birding lately (the whole trip actually) is my inability to see the "grassland" sparrows, along with Nelson's, Seaside and and Saltmarsh Sparrows. The guy who had just seen the SJ, said, "Oh, that bird that just flushed...I think it was a Nelson's. I used to be good at them but haven't done much recently, but I think that's what it was." Admittedly, I haven't spent enough time and patience in their habitat, often am out in the middle of the day instead of early morning, and it isn't breeding season, but still..... These are my next serious challenge.
The VC was busy. A visitor said loudly, "We want to see big birds..." There was a female Painted Bunting and many Red-winged Blackbirds at the nearby feeder. I asked about Scrub Jays and was told I might have luck at a main intersection "the one with a stop light, just down the road. "Look at all four corners; you might see the sentinel. They're known to nest in that area." So I parked along the road and checked it out, but only saw perched Kestrels and Mockingbirds.
I then drove to the Bio Lab Road (with huge potholes), went on down about two miles but turned around. It would have taken an hour to go to the end and back and it wasn't good Scrub Jay habitat. The wind was blowing hard, and the sky was overcast but it wasn't cold. I carried on the inner dialogue about going to the Pine Flatwoods Trail, another mile loop several miles north. I went. No one else was there; it seemed a lonesome out-of-way place, but it was only a mile, a roughly square trail, mostly through open sand scrub. With the wind and it being mid afternoon, not many birds were out, and no Scrub Jays. I walked under a tree with three Black Vultures, saw a distant woodpecker, heard a few twitterings and decided to quit looking so hard, go back to the car, feeling I had tried, which is precisely when two Scrub Jays appeared on the trail just ahead of me and hung around for 20-30 photos, not overly concerned by my presence, hopping into the brush and then up on exposed branches. A bird-cache found!
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| Florida Scrub Jay - Merritt Island NWR - FL |
Returning over the bridge, I pulled over to watch windboarders who would run parallel and very close to the shores, often jumping and flying through the sky before coming back to the water. Jeez....what fun!
My motel room (Best Western via Priceline) turned out to be a smoking room with no possibility of changing it. The guy at the desk blamed Priceline and said booking.com was the way to go. He maintained Hotwire, Priceline and Expedia were "all the same; I hate 'em all." But there was an adjacent restaurant where I had good broiled salmon. I worked some but had intermittent computer issues so shut it down after a couple of hours.
It was a rainy windy night...
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| Windboarders -Titusville, FL |
SO happy you saw not only one Florida Scrub Jay but two!
ReplyDeleteBird cache for sure!