Pandemic Diaries Weeks #45 & #46

10 February 2021

 

When we first moved to St. Augustine, I explained that we were living on Anastasia Island, a small barrier island to the east of the city of St. Augustine.  At that time, I didn't realize that between our island and the mainland there are a series of smaller islands, some uninhabitable.  And that much of the area between Anastasia and the mainland is actually wetlands, or at least it is near us in the vague middle of the island.

So - Anastasia is approximately 14 miles long, and at its widest it is roughly one mile wide.  The island is shaped vaguely like an upside-down tear drop, rather elongated.  The Matanzas River separates the island from the mainland, but the north and south ends of the island are open to the Atlantic Ocean.  There is also a network of creeks that feed into the Matanzas, and our dock is on one of those small creeks.

The river and those tributaries create the intracoastal waterway, and we occasionally see motorboats, kayaks, and canoes wending their way through the intracoastal.  The river itself is deep enough to navigate at all times, but many of these smaller creeks become incredibly shallow during low tide, and can only be used by kayaks and canoes.

Our house is about halfway down Anastasia Island, and between all the creeks and the river are mud- and reed-covered islands.  These are the wetlands - swamps, marshes, bogs, whatever you want to call these muck and plant-covered blobs of land swelling up between all the water.

 

I've taken photos from Google Earth's satellite images, so you can see how large this wetland area is in our part of the island.  It's about 1.3 miles from our island to the houses on the mainland side (about 2 km).  This is one of the wider parts of the wetland area, but it extends several miles north and south of us.  So yes, this is a really large wetland area, full of all kinds of interesting wildlife - the birds, raccoons, opossums, and who knows what else.  I wouldn't be surprised if we see an alligator or two in the spring!  (I'd kind of like to see an alligator, as long as it isn't too close!).  

The photos are marked with a tiny red dot to denote the dock at the end of our street, where I go to look for birds and just enjoy the open space and nature.  It's about half a mile from our house on Fountain of Youth Boulevard.  No, the wetland is definitely not the fountain of youth, the water is quite murky and brown and not drinkable!

This wetland area is the reason we have all these amazing birds right here!  It also makes for a rather humid environment, our little mile-wide bit of land between the wetlands and the ocean.  But it also has created a lush green landscape for all the fauna of the wetlands.

Yesterday morning, it was foggy and eerie.  The fog blows in off the ocean, or comes from the wetlands, or fills our island from both directions.  In all that spooky grey morning light, I saw two white ibises wandering down our street, using those long curved beaks to dig into lawns searching for their brunch!  SO amazing to see them like that, and they didn't seem to mind as I quietly followed them down the street, taking photos as they ignored me and went about their birdy business.

 

It isn't easy to get photos of moving birds, and the fog didn't help.  So these are a bit fuzzier images than I'd usually include.

 

But ibises are such beautiful and intriguing birds, I just had to add my photos.  I did my best to be a stealth photographer, but birds do tend to notice anything large enough to look like a threatening predator.  And they don't understand enough English to listen to me softly telling them how lovely they are, that I won't hurt them, all that.  Besides, I obviously wasn't edible, so they mostly ignored me.

Another morning, I saw something large fly into our backyard.  Looking up, I saw that a hawk had flown onto a broken branch of a tree!!!  What a thrill!  Of course, I grabbed the camera and slipped out the back door, taking photos and telling the hawk he/she was amazing, with beautiful mottled brown and white feathers, and more white with brown bar feathers on the chest.  Just a beautiful hawk, so regal, with golden eyes keeping track of everything happening in our yard, the neighbors' yards, and likely everything within the hawk's very long vision.

I think it might be a short-tail hawk, but I'm not sure.  I'm a very amateur birder, and while I like to know what kind of bird I'm looking at, often I just don't know.  But it was amazing to be close enough to this hawk to get these photos - and you can see that it was a nice sunny morning that day.

One of the most exciting birds in the wetlands are the ospreys - we see them frequently, flying overhead, swooping into the water to catch their meals.  Our nearby supermarket has tall lightposts in the parking lot with flat panel lights on top, and several ospreys are buildings nests on these convenient tall flat-topped lights.  When we go grocery shopping, I've started taking my little camera with me in my pocket, so I can take photos of these amazing birds. 

Some of the zoom photos of the osprey in the tree make it look young, but it was a windy and cold day, and I think the bird puffed up its feathers to stay warm.  Or maybe the wind just fluffed up the feathers.  But it looks more like a fuzzy young bird rather than a bird of prey with razor sharp beak and talons.

 

And if you look closely at the nest, there are little bits of ripped plastic in there with the twigs and branches.  No idea why an osprey might add a piece of plastic bag to a nest, unless maybe it just happened to be with a twig picked up and carefully placed in the nest.

This week, there were the beginnings of more osprey nests on half the lightposts in the supermarket parking lot.  

And one osprey, eating a fish.  If you look really closely, you can see the tail of the fish hanging off one side of the light.  The osprey would eat a bite, look around, eat some more.  Then the bird picked up the fish and flew to a different light on the same post, looking off into the fog for, well, who knows.  Its partner, maybe.  Or any possible predators, though I'm not sure exactly what other animal might be up that high to threaten this osprey.  More likely this one was keeping an eye out for other ospreys who might try to steal his/her fish.

There is often drama down by the dock, when incoming pelicans use their vigorous splashdown to scare away the smaller egrets or herons.  Or when the pelicans make their somewhat ungainly take off from the water.  

 

The herons and egrets are much more graceful, easily lifting off on those long legs with their wide wingspan as they slowly and lazily fly off into the distance.

But then, pelicans seem to enjoy each other's company, often flying by in flocks.  The egrets and herons are much more solitary, often enjoying a morning fishing alone with only their reflection in the water.

 

 

I always look in the mud under the dock at low tide, because the footprints are interesting.  The large birds leave distinctive prints, while the raccoons leave little human-like hand prints.  Well, if we humans had skinnier fingers.

Okay, last bird and set of photos - we have several pileated woodpeckers here.  These are large woodpeckers, roughly the size of crows, with sort of speckled or barred grey and black backs and wings, and a bright red head or crest.  While I've seen these woodpeckers on the trees around the houses, occasionally I'll see one trying to peck his way into a palm tree.  It seems very odd, but I guess to a woodpecker a tree is a tree, and trees have bugs, and bugs are lunch.

Okay, just reminding family and friends to stay safe.  In the past couple of weeks, I've had two friends with either close family becoming ill with Covid, or who became critically ill themselves, necessitating hospital stays.  I know it gets boring - I mean, this is my second blog about birds!  But it's important - social distance, wear masks, wash those hands.  Be safe!