Daytona Beach Shores: Where Gulls Go to Vacation

As promised, here’s a look at the avian scene over at the beach, a block east of our little subdivision.  To begin, let’s forget that the Atlantic hurricane season has just begun and drop back several months to December.  What will we find on the beach here in the Shores (as Daytona Beach Shores is known locally)?  Ten thousand gulls.  Give or take a few thousand.  For reasons having to do with avoiding the New England shivers, gulls from up and down the eastern seaboard flock to our beach to spend the winter.  Which is why you are likely to encounter, on any given winter afternoon, Michael Brothers, former director of the Marine Science Center down at Lighthouse Point, studying the mass of gulls along the shoreline through the lens of his tri-pod birding scope.  For him, scanning this confederation of gulls is like panning for gold. 

Michael’s great delight is to spot a gull that shouldn’t be there—say, a California Gull—amid the general run of Laughing Gulls, Herring Gulls, and Ring-billed Gulls.  I’m always happy to spot Michael there among the gulls, but the gulls themselves simply don’t move me.  Terns, on the other hand, I find infinitely fascinating.  At various times of year, our beach attracts Least Terns, Forster’s Terns, Sandwich Terns (who look as if they have a little mustard on their beaks), and Caspian Terns—you name ’em, we got ’em.  And always, the Royal Terns, larger than most and comical to a fault when seen on the ground, where, in our family, their frowsy topknots have gained them the nickname “Spikers,” after the designation for a spiked hairdo.  Devilishly difficult to photograph because of their incredible agility in diving for fish, the Least Terns and Forster’s Terns are at the other end of the spectrum from the Royal Terns in terms of size.  A Least Tern feeding its chicks on the beach is an entertaining event that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys birds.

My interest in photographing birds was quickened by a pair of Black Skimmers who deposited three eggs on the open sand of our beach and proceeded to nurture the two surviving chicks.  The bizarre-looking Skimmers proved to be excellent parents, but their choice of a location for the nest demanded great vigilance on the part several of us, since cars and trucks are allowed to drive on the beach in this area.  Ironically, as the chicks matured and began hopping around and flying, the nesting area moved almost daily and had to be re-staked and re-designated with orange tape. 

I decided to document the growth of the Black Skimmer chicks using the Minolta SRT-101 that I had bought decades before when I was overseas in the Army.  But film, and the processing thereof, is expensive, so I took a cue from my wife and bought a digital camera.  That first Nikon, a D-80, gave way to a D300, then a D600, and now the D750.  Time does not stand still, birds do not stand still, and neither does camera technology.  I greatly admire the professionals who brandish the latest cameras (and those 600mm lenses), but for budgetary reasons, and because I favor handheld shooting to capture birds in flight, I expect I’ll stick with my 80x400 zoom with the 1.5x teleconverter for the foreseeable future.

Besides the gulls and terns, it would be good to mention several other habitués of our beach.  Snowy Egrets stake out their territories daily, sometimes contentiously, and we see an occasional Reddish Egret, though they tend to remain further south.  Most mornings, a Yellow-crowned Night Heron will be looking for crabs in the soft sand high on the beach.  Near dusk, we often see a Great Blue Heron fishing in the shallow surf.  There are Pelicans galore, of course, drifting in groups of up to twenty, and Osprey gliding high above the water in preparation for a furious dive to grab a fish.  Once a year, there will be Northern Gannets diving about a half-a-mile offshore, a stirring sight, if only from a distance.  And every once in a while in the winter, in addition to the Double-crested Cormorants and the Anhingas, we will see a Loon in the surf, devoid of the usual striking black and white colors, but impressive just the same.

Florida’s reputation for harboring political kooks and certifiable crazies is well deserved, but day-to-day life presents a much more natural sort of excitement for the person who keeps an eye out for the activities of our native birds, along with the occasional appearance of interesting arrivals via migration.  Red Knots travel thousands upon thousands of miles each year, and to see a group of eight or ten of them foraging along the surf-line at our beach is a wonderful reminder of the remarkable diversity of life that we are called upon to preserve as environmental stewards.  Keeping that in mind, we would do well to ignore the crazies on TV and take a stroll on the beach in the Shores.