Beachside Birding, West of A1A

As a birding enthusiast who makes no claim to be a knowledgeable birder in the strictest sense, I am constantly aware of the busy avian activity in our neighborhood, a block from the beach in Daytona Beach Shores.*  Setting aside the birds on the actual beach, for a moment, one can expect to encounter on beachside a number of typical species, including House Sparrows, Northern Mockingbirds, Northern Cardinals, Mourning Doves, Rock Doves (i.e. Pigeons), Gray Catbirds, and Fish Crows (and their smaller cousins the Boat-tail Grackle and the Starling).  Equally predictable in Central Florida is the presence, in numbers, of Palm Warblers.  They flit from flowering bush to palm tree around our house, assiduously avoiding the Cooper’s Hawk that races between the houses and the Kestrel  that occasionally visits us.**  In a more exotic vein, we do have a family of Loggerhead Shrikes visible almost every evening as our walk takes us to the east end of the traffic circle.  Though they have a reputation for barbarous behavior, I have yet to observe one of our Shrikes feeding upon anything but large insects, so I regard them as suitably humane neighbors. 

My friend Jim lives a mile or so north of us on beachside, where he has a feeder that attracts Painted Buntings during their migration in the spring.  Lacking a feeder (due to Homeowners’ Association restrictions), we have seen exactly one male and one female of the species in nearly twenty years of throwing seed in the garden surreptitiously.  Ditto with Hummingbirds.  The one hummer we did see was shivering on a leafless branch out front on a cold day in February, a sad reminder of the many that used to delight us as we sat on our porch in Virginia.  If you’ve never labored to liberate a Hummingbird that has impaled its beak in the screen on your porch, you can’t imagine what a delicate operation that is.  Here, we have no screen on the porch, and, alas, no Hummingbirds.

Another one-time visitor was a Red-breasted Nuthatch, working upside down on the trunk of the crêpe myrtle tree.  I actually made artistic use of that visit in my song “Erin at the Window,” so I thank Mother Nature for sending the inspiration.  As I close out this account of beachside birds, I would be remiss if I did not mention the Tree Swallows which hold down the insect population for us by streaking above the neighborhood afternoons and evenings.  By contrast, the lizard population is decidedly not under control, which pleases us lizard lovers.  We do, however, have two visitors from the beach, birds which stroll through the neighborhood in search of those very lizards.  I am referring to a Snowy Egret who works its way around bushes and palms in search of long-tailed delicacies, and a Great Egret who pursues the same prey.  It’s amazing to watch the Great Egret extend its thin neck, swaying it back and forth almost as if to mesmerize its victim before striking.  The technique seems to work, as it does a brisk business in lizards.

I’ll close this segment with a promise to get to work on an account of the birds to be encountered across A1A on the beach itself, the white sands of “The World’s Most Famous Beach.”

*According to local parlance, the Daytona Beach area is divided into “mainland” and “beachside,” the latter consisting of a thin strip of land only two blocks wide toward the southern end of the peninsula (our end), wider as one drives up toward Ormond Beach.

**Up by the branch post office, about eight blocks north of us, I happened to have my camera in the car when I spotted a Hawk on a telephone wire.  As I exited the car, camara in hand, the bird glided down into the tall, uncut grass of the rental home and emerged with a good-sized snake.  As a kind gesture to this photographer, the Hawk (it turned out to be a young one of the Red-Shouldered variety) landed with its prey on the low roof of a neighboring house.  I got some nice shots of the fierce bird as it prepared to take off from the roof a few minutes later.