Birding Amelia Island

A naturalist’s blog by, Janet Tharin


I started the day at sunrise on a dune over-looking a Savannah and the beach with an immature bald eagle landing on the shoreline. It is the same one that I’v seen hanging around this last week chasing ospreys carrying fish. I saw four Merlin but no Peregrine Falcons.

There was no wind and some sea fog, which is actually called avocation fog, which occurs when the warm moist air blows from the warmer sea and over the colder landmass causing the air to cool and the water vapor to condense at the ground level.
The sand gnats and lack of raptors sent me looking for shorebirds.

I placed a chair at the waterline and observed a variety of shorebirds that roosted quite near to me. Several dozen Black Skimmers came; followed by six immature who have almost gained full black feathers instead of the brown they have been wearing since they fledged. I saw twenty-four Royal Terns mixed with a dozen Sandwich Terns, a Forester’s Tern and eight Caspian Terns completed the mix. I watched about half of the Royal Terns begging their parents for food. Most ignored this behavior but every so often a royal tern would fly by with a fish and call to a juvenile who would leave the roosting birds and intercept the fish from it’s parent in midair, followed almost instantly by several other crying juveniles who would only stop pursuit once the fish was swallowed. Royal Terns feed their young unusually long, eight months, with both parents sharing in the responsibility. The theory exists that because they have an extended adolescence since they don’t breed until their third or fourth year, thereby watching their parents hunt for so long allows them to develop better foraging skills.

Along with the terns were a few Herring Gulls, Laughing Gulls, some Sanderlings and a lone Dunlin. I don’t often see Dunlins on Amelia Island State Park as I do on Little Talbot Island’s beach. They are shy birds and people and vehicle traffic scare them off. Not so the Great Egrets and Great Blue Herons gathered at the shoreline to feed. The Egrets are great opportunists, shamelessly surrounding fisherman looking for a stray piece of bait especially when the fishermen are cast netting fingerling mullet. I counted six Great Egrets within ten feet of one fisherman.

This last week I have seen thousands of migrating swallows in huge gyrating vortexes traveling south. The Double Crested Corommorants are flying high in great V’s remansiant of Canada Geese.