#539 at The Alligator Farm: Wood Stork
Today I arrived in Florida for a long weekend at the Alligator Farm. (No Accountemps jokes please.) I was mainly there for a photo workshop, and you can see some of those photos in my Picasa album. However I’d be lying if I said one of the attractions of the site wasn’t a really easy life bird:
I’d hoped to find Wood Stork somewhere in Texas back in February, but I hadn’t. Here at this time of year, however, they’re an absolute lock. They were quite unmissable. I never did a full count, but I’d guess there are in the vicinity of a couple of dozen Wood Storks hanging out here, building nests, and raising young. And of course there are also hundreds of Great Egrets, Snowy Egrets, Little Blue Herons, Roseate Spoonbills, White Ibises, Common and Boat-tailed Grackles, and of course American Alligators:
Sadly, I didn’t have time to hunt down any other lifers on this trip. I should have taken an extra day. I made one brief search for Painted Bunting but came up empty. This wasn’t primarily a birding trip, but I still managed about 40 species including:
- Brown Pelican
- Great Blue Heron
- Laughing Gull
- Black-bellied Plover
- Mallard
- Greater Yellowlegs
- Great Crested Flycatcher
- Barn Swallow
- Carolina Wren
- Fish Crow
- Mourning Dove
- Gray Catbird
- Bald Eagle
- Ring-billed Gull
- Peregrine Falcon
- Northern Mockingbird
- Black-crowned Night-Heron
- Double-crested Cormorant
- Red-bellied Woodpecker
- Common Grackle
- Osprey
- Blue Jay
- Tricolored Heron
- Cooper’s Hawk
- Northern Cardinal
- Little Blue Heron
- Eurasian Collared-Dove
- Snowy Egret
- Roseate Spoonbill
- White Ibis
- Red-winged Blackbird
- Turkey Vulture
- American Crow
- Wood Stork
- Least Bittern
- Boat-tailed Grackle
- Great Egret
- Cattle Egret
- Common Loon
- Black Vulture
