Shaking up Sarasota's Birding Community

This past November, I joined my mom and dad on a month long road trip to the East coast to spend time with family, doing some sight seeing and wildlife watching along the way. We spent several days visiting my grandmother in Sarasota, Florida, and it was during this time that I got to go birding at several of Sarasota's birding hotspots. While I have visited Sarasota many times during my life to visit my grandmother, this was the first time I had done any birding in the area. With this in mind, one park I wanted to visit was Urfer Family Park along Bee Ridge Road, as it was only a short distance away from my grandmother's house and I had visited it before. I walked the small boardwalk near the parking lot with my dad on November 19th, and while I did not spend much time there, it was a decision that I wouldn't regret.

About midway down the boardwalk, I spotted two birds foraging for insects in the trees right next to me. One was a Blue-headed Vireo, an unusual bird for me given that I live in California. The other was a Golden-crowned Kinglet, a bird that I saw dozens of in the California mountains over the summer prior to this trip. Because I was more familiar with the kinglet, I did not think much of it at the time, only snapping enough photos to identify it later. I then moved on to the end of the boardwalk, where the forest canopy had been opened up by hurricane Ian and several trees had fallen over. This area was bustling with song birds! All within the span of five minutes, I saw another Blue-headed Vireo, several Blue-gray Gnatcatchers and Yellow-rumped Warblers, a Carolina Wren, and my first ever Northern Parula. The latter of these was really exciting to me, and since I like to keep my life list on EBird complete, I decided to submit a EBird list for the outing (see https://ebird.org/checklist/S122666029).

Later that night, I got an email from John Groskopf, one of the EBird data reviewers for Sarasota County, FL. He asked me to be more precise in my description of the Golden-crowned Kinglet sighting on my list so that he could confirm the sighting. According to him, this was only the second ever recorded sighting of a Golden-crowned Kinglet in Sarasota County, FL. When I heard this, I was so excited to have found a really rare bird for the area while just casually birding at a local park. Being pretty bad at explaining my ID thought process, I simply downloaded the photos of the kinglet from my camera and uploaded them to EBird, knowing that the photos would speak for themself. Two days later, I traveled back to Urfer Family Park to look for Barred Owls. As I was approaching the trail towards the oak scrub and pine woods, I noticed a large group of birdwatchers, dispersed over the area and searching intently for something. At first I thought it was an organized bird walk, but then I went up to someone to ask about it and they said that everyone was looking for the Golden-crowned Kinglet that had recently been reported on Ebird. I then mentioned how I was the one who found it and everyone came over to talk to me and ask me questions about the encounter and where I was from. It was amazing how I had completely shaken up the birding community with a quick visit to a local park on a family trip and it was an experience I will never forget.

But one question still remains about the second ever confirmed Golden-crowned Kinglet sighting in Sarasota County, Florida: how did the bird get there? This is always the question when it comes to accidental and rarity bird sightings, but in this case, I actually have a possible answer. The year 2022 has been a difficult weather year for the Southeastern states, with multiple hurricanes passing over Florida and Georgia, one of which took place just a few weeks prior to my sighting of the kinglet. It is likely that these storms impacted the migration patterns of small song birds and forced them outside of their normal range boundaries. Normally, Golden-crowned Kinglets that winter in Florida only do so in the forests of the Florida Panhandle, never moving farther South into the Florida Peninsula. It is possible that all of the recent storm activity pushed some of these tiny birds farther South into the Florida Peninsula, beyond their normal range. While this makes sense, the real reason remains to be discovered.

הועלה ב-דצמבר 13, 2022 11:21 אחה"צ על ידי tothemax