Duck survey, but weather was bad
I was sitting in my car in the Lighthouse parking lot at St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge on Monday morning waiting for the rain to stop. It had been a disastrous morning. I was supposed to be taking the current refuge interns on a combined shorebird/duck survey, but the weather did not cooperate. We met in the Visitor Center parking lot at 6:30 am and moved out the North levee on Stony Bayou II to wait for the Wood Duck morning flight. The forecast showed a brief period of rain at 9:00 am and we all had rain gear, which was fortunate, because it started to drizzle as we stood in the dark just before 7:00 am. The drizzle turned into a light steady rain. It was a grim, dark, windy morning.
The Wood Ducks never showed up. It happens. We gave up and started to run our route. Within a quarter mile, the rain turned serious and then the lightning came. It is dangerous to be out on the levees in a thunderstorm and I decided to reschedule the shorebird survey for another day. Preferably one with better weather. The interns went home.
Duck surveys aren’t dependent on the timing of a high tide and I decided to stick around to do the duck survey when the rain stopped. That is what led me to be sitting in the Lighthouse parking lot reading the morning paper on my phone when I looked through the rain-streaked windshield at the Gulf and noticed that something black had surfaced. It wasn’t very big and it disappeared beneath the water before I could grab my binoculars. It kept popping up, but only for a few seconds. It was about the size of a duck, but didn’t act like one. By this time, I had turned on the car to get the windshield wipers and defroster going.
My mystery object’s appearances were so short that if I rested my binoculars on my lap, I didn’t have time to get them up before it went down. Then, I noticed that it stayed in about the same spot and I patiently watched that spot through my binoculars until it surfaced and I got a brief glimpse of the bulbous snout of a manatee that was grazing on sea grasses in the shallow water. They occasionally show up at St. Marks. Although, you are more liable to see them from a canoe or kayak than from land.
I finally got the duck survey going in late morning. I had ducks in low numbers in several places, mostly on Lighthouse Pool, Headquarters Pond and Tower Pond. I ended up with a total of 233 ducks, light for March. I had nine species of waterfowl, but Teal predominated as they usually do in March.
Half the ducks were Green-winged Teal and a quarter were Blue-winged Teal. I also had eight shovelers and a single female pintail.
I saw a few other birds as I ran the survey route. There was a Cliff Swallow mixed in with a huge flock of Tree Swallows, a Merlin perched on a dead tree and a Stilt Sandpiper feeding with Least Sandpipers on the mud flats at Headquarters Pond. The weather improved slowly and by the time I finished at noon, it was a sunny day.
Don Morrow can be reached at donaldcmorrow@gmail.com.