More Great Backyard Birdcount-- and Beyond!

As I mentioned in my last post, I had a lot of fun on this year's Great Backyard Bird Count. Since I first wrote about it from the road, without the ability to include pictures, I thought I'd follow up with  photos of a few favorite sightings.

One of our first stops was at Disney World, where we spotted this Palm Warbler searching the waterline for tasty bugs.

We spotted this Snowy Egret at our next stop, St. Petersburg. I love the bird's yellow feet, or "golden slippers" as my field guide calls them!

St. Petersburg turned out to be very good for birding, with lots of small parks and canals. Crescent Lake held a lot of domestic-type ducks that were clearly well-fed by locals, but also this American Coot, White Ibis, and Wood Stork (left to right).

St. Pete also has a colony of Eurasian Collared-doves, not native to the U.S. but still fun to see. We also spotted another non-native, the Monk Parakeet I mentioned last post, but couldn't get good photos of it. Cool to see, though!

As we continued to explore the city, we stumbled onto a park whose mudflats held several kinds of gulls and sandpipers, but most excitingly, hundreds of Black Skimmers! Their weird-looking beaks let them skim food right from the water as they glide just above the surface. I think they were my favorite sighting from the trip.

The GBBC is over for this year, but you can still log your project data at eBird.org through March 1, if you haven't gotten around to it yet! Non-GBBC sightings are important to enter too, to help scientists understand long-term patterns or changes. How will birds' migration paths and timing change as our climate changes? Those are just a few of the issues ornithologists are studying with the help of eBirders. 

Ebirders can help document shifts as they happen by logging bird sightings all year round. That's what I'm trying to do by entering at least one checklist every day. Bonus: I've already added several new species to my life list, including the above-mentioned Monk Parakeet, Black Skimmer, and this fussy little Orange-Crowned Warbler we saw in Jackson Square in New Orleans!

The warbler was very active and rarely stayed still for very long. Eventually I got good enough looks at it for identification, and for Victor to get this adorable photo.

If you want to join eBird too, it's super easy to get started. Go to eBird.org and create a free account. Next, identify birds you see in your yard, from your office, or wherever you like, and report them. That's it! If you don't have a bird field guide already, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology even created a great app to help you identify birds, called Merlin. As I mentioned above, I used it this trip to help me identify that Orange-Crowned Warbler! I highly recommend checking it out.

Happy birding! I'd love to hear in the comments what you all are seeing in your area.