Iceland Gull

As a general rule well over ninety percent of the birds that you encounter at St. Marks NWR are where and when they ought to be, both within their usual range and in their expected season. These are the usual suspects; the local residents, summer breeders, migrants or wintering birds that you expect to see when you go birding at the refuge. Sometimes birds may be may be slightly off-course or a little early or late migrating, but they generally obey the rules.

This is why you should pay attention to the range and status maps in your field guide. Say that you see a small grayish flycatcher in January. Your field guide shows nineteen small grayish flycatchers, many of which look very similar. However, thirteen of them are out of range with some being West Coast birds. Two of the remaining flycatchers are summer residents at the refuge and three are found here only during migration. That leaves only the Eastern Phoebe as a probable identification and you should consider why this isn’t some plumage variation of a phoebe before considering, say, Gray Flycatcher, a summer resident of the interior West.

Most of the remaining birds that you encounter at St. Marks will be nominally out of range or season. Often out-of-range/season birds occur during spring or fall migratory periods when birds are on the move. Occasionally there’s a winter wanderer. The rarest of these would perhaps be a Western Tanager or an overwintering Summer Tanager. These are species that have strayed or stayed before. They’re unusual but not totally unexpected. 

Less than one percent of birds fall into the WHOA!!!!!! category. These may be sedentary species from elsewhere in the US that don’t usually wander or birds from Asia, Europe, the Caribbean or South America. St. Marks has had a few of these. A Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher, a Southwestern species that usually isn’t found East of Texas, was spotted at the refuge in 1991. The first State record of Yellow-nosed Albatross was photographed on Lighthouse Pool back in 1983. The only State record of Lesser Sand Plover, a Siberian species, was seen on Stony Bayou in 2005.

Currently a juvenile Iceland Gull is being seen at the refuge, around Lighthouse Pool. While not ultra-rare, it definitely fits into the WHOA!!!!! category. Iceland Gulls are only found in Iceland in the winter. They breed along the coasts of Greenland and the Canadian High Arctic. Juvenile birds may winter as far South as the Northern tier of US states. Rarely they reach Florida, where there have been less than twenty-five accepted records over the last century. This is the first Iceland Gull seen on the refuge; the refuge’s 360th recorded bird species.

This Iceland Gull provides a chance to see a locally rare species, but birding at the refuge in mid-January offers the opportunity to observe over 190 regularly occurring species. Some like Redhead are easy to find and some like Black Duck are more difficult. Each year there are also uncommon or rarely seen species. This winter has had records of Ash-throated Flycatcher and Yellow Rail. 

Come down to St. Marks. You never know what you’ll find.