Not On Any Maps

At sunrise on Thursday morning, I was sitting on a folding camp stool in the middle of a grassy road South of Tram Road at St. Marks NWR. I was trying to find a Yellow-breasted Chat that was singing loudly in the top of a nearby pine. Chats are brown-backed and white-bellied with a butter-yellow chest and throat. They usually stay low and are hidden in thick shrubs, but males will perch in trees when singing on territory. Singing is perhaps an inaccurate term. Chats make a series of whistles, tweets and rasping gurgles that sound like several unrelated birds taking turns calling. I finally saw it when it changed trees. 

This road does not appear on maps. It’s simply a route that the US Fish & Wildlife Service drives through the woods in order to monitor several Red-cockaded Woodpecker cavities. It’s low and wet. Along the road, there are several marshes ringed by the white flowering spikes of Arrowhead. Growing in and along the road are Hatpins and Whitetop Sedges, Colicroot and Meadow Beauty. Scattered about are clumps of bright orange Candyweed, the white twisting spires of Ladies Tresses Orchids and Grass Pink Orchids that look “like a dress a fairy would dance in”. It’s a pleasant enough place to watch for flatwoods birds on a summer morning before the heat sets in.

I could hear Red-cockaded and Red-bellied Woodpeckers calling nearby and Great Crested Flycatchers calling in the distance. Pine Warblers were foraging through the trees. There was the harsh skeow from an unseen Green Heron and Eastern Towhees were singing. It was a cloudy morning with no wind and there were only a few biting flies around, but they were of little bother. As I stood up to start the mile and a half walk back to my car, a hummingbird flew by me.

It’s June at the refuge. The hotdog heads of Cattails have turned from green to brown and are suddenly visible. Look closely and you can see the green fruit of Dahoon, Virginia Creeper and Wild Grape. When they ripen, they will be food for our local birds and for Fall migrants as they head South. It’s an odd month when we still have the last of our migrant shorebirds headed North, but our breeding birds are finishing up and may even be going for a second try. 

Most of the shorebirds are on East River Pool, which is rapidly turning into a mudflat. Their numbers are unusually high this late in the year, primarily due to large numbers of Semipalmated Sandpipers. 

At the Double Bridges, I had a family of Prothonotary Warblers near the first bridge. A brightly colored adult was being closely followed by three duller colored immature birds that would land nearby and flutter their wings, begging for food. Down at Lighthouse Pool, I saw an adult Clapper Rail swim to shore from a marshy island. It was pursued by a trio of fuzzy black chicks that were almost adult size, but with much shorter bills.

The American Flamingo is still on East River Pool, but it may be leaving soon. In both of the last two years, the flamingo left in late June and returned in the Fall. Flamingos in the wild can live for twenty or thirty years, so this pattern could go on for a while, but at some point, it will disappear for good. 

We are headed for the summer solstice, the end of the birding year at St. Marks, when the world pauses for an instant between late Spring migration and early Fall migration. However, there’s still birding to do. Come down and see the flamingo while it’s still at the refuge. It’s spectacular.