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Posted by Paul-the-other on 06:24:30 01/16/08
Down below, Brendan Fogarty gave a location tip to a place that I had never been to in all my years in Florida. The amazing thing about it is it is very productive (from a photography standpoint) and ties in wonderfully with a visit to Green Cay/Wakodahatchee. The place is the Boynton Beach inlet.
If you leave Wako/Green Cay go north on jog/Hagen Ranch and then east on Woolbright. Take Woolbright all the way to the beach (AIA). Go north until you reach the inlet...you'll know it. Turn quickly before you get to the bridge and go down the hill to the concession area. Clean bathrooms! Plenty of parking.
Brendan's tip got us several hundred pictures of Turnstones, Royal Terns, Sanderlings and more gull than we could identify (probably all the same with seasonal plummage change). In two visits to this site I rendered obsolete five years of turnstone pictures from the Everglades Park...the set up for photographers is simply marvelous. The ocean breeze is so strong and channeled under the bridge in a way that gulls, pelicans and terns float suspended and you can get some marvelous in-flight pictures. There are many fish-people around and fileting boards so my guess is that the birds are habituated. Chumming seemed to be in order the two times I was there..people throwing tidbits to the birds.
A cute anecdotal story: as we were scurry around the beach getting low level pictures of the birds with some pretty big Nikon glass it occured to us that the ladies in bikinis were getting agitated and their menfolk looked like a Charles Atlas ads. We figured we were about to get sand kicked in our faces. So in our best Shakespearean stage voice we shouted to one another.." look a sanderling, quick shoot....over there a turnstone watch out for the jellyfish..". That seemed to calm things down.
Did we scare the birds with our antics? No way They were eating potato chips from the lunch baskets of the tourists. One couple actually had some turnstones and sanderling nestled into the sand about a foot from their beach blanket.
Thank you Brendan for showing yet another birding location in our backyard. This "buds" for you!
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