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Sabrina, a coworker of mine who lives in Tampa, Florida, sent me the pic below of a mystery bird that has been showing up of late and roosting all night on a beam on the roof of her porch.  Mike, Charlie, and I had wildly divergent guesses, and when Sabrina eventually got a shot that [...]

After a couple of hours spent at Crandon Park wondering - it has to be said - where all the birds were, I decided to hop a bus down to the end of Biscayne Key for a look around Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park [BBCFSP] (which isn’t much larger than its mouthful of [...]

My first visit to the US of the year (hardly surprising given that it’s only the second week of 2008 and that I’d just been at home after a trip to Narita, Japan), which meant that almost everything I saw would be ‘new for the year’ - that almost magical state where an American Coot [...]

Florida, land of limpkins, oasis of anhingas, gathering place of gallinules, offers some of the most distinctive birding in the United States. Not only is the Sunshine State home to an abundance of egrets and herons unheard of in northern climes but it also dangles the promise of potential Caribbean and subtropical species.
So why was [...]

The biodiverse expanse of the Everglades is a lepidopterist’s delight, serving up really sensational butterfly species. However, the non-avian critter that really caught my attention during my trip to Loxahatchee NWR was the big, beautiful Lubber Grasshopper.
The Eastern Lubber Grasshopper (Romalea guttata or Romalea microptera) is fairly common throughout the southeastern United States, particularly Florida. [...]

Once the meeting I traveled for was finished on Thursday, I made an evening trek to MacArthur Beach State Park in North Palm Beach. My main goal was simply to enjoy the ocean and maybe spot a few terns. However, when I arrived, I heard that this quiet, well-designed refuge had something very special to [...]

Purple Gallinule
Wakadohatchee Wetlands sits merely a few miles from Loxahatchee NWR. This site sees a lot more visitors as locals and tourists alike walk, run, and bike its impressive elevated boardwalk. Wakadohatchee is cleverly constructed as part of a water treatment plant which may sound slightly gross to you but seems positively delicious to waders [...]

White Ibis
Ah, Florida…land of waders and waterfowl. Is there an American heron or egret that hasn’t made a home in the Sunshine State? Business brought me to the Palm Beach area, an ever-expanding commercial zone that might charitably be described as a wasteland of strip malls and ostentatious development. This part of the state isn’t [...]