Florida Wood Stork

Video: Wood Stork

The Wood Stork is the only species of stork that breeds in the U.S. This large bird is protected as a Threatened species by the Federal Endangered Species Act.

The wood stork is a large, long legged wading bird that reaches a length of 35-45 inches  with a wingspan of 60-65 inches ).  The primary and tail feathers are black .  The head and upper neck of adult wood storks have no feathers, but have gray rough scaly skin.  Wood storks also have a black bill and black legs with pink toes.  Adult wood storks are voiceless and are capable of only making hissing sounds. 

Life History

Wood storks feed on small to medium-sized fish, crayfish, amphibians, and reptiles.  Their hunting technique is unique as they will move their partially opened bill through water, snapping up prey when the prey comes in contact with the bill.

The wood stork is the only species of stork that breeds in the U.S..  Wood storks are very social in nesting habitats, as they are often seen nesting in large colonies of 100-500 nests.  Colonies in South Florida form late November to early March, while wood storks in Central and North Florida form colonies from February to March .  After copulation, males begin gathering twigs for constructing nests .  Wood stork nests are primarily built in trees that stand in water (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service 1999).  In Florida, wood storks are capable of laying eggs from October to June.  Females lay a single clutch of two to five eggs per season .  The average incubation period is 30 days, with young wood storks able to fly 10-12 weeks after hatching .

Habitat and Distribution

WoodStork Distribution MapWood storks nest in mixed hardwood swamps, sloughs, mangroves, and cypress domes/strands in Florida .  They forage in a variety of wetlands including both freshwater and estuarine marshes, although limited to depths less than 10-12 inches.  The wood stork breeds in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.  Non-breeding wood storks have an extensive range throughout North America, to northern Argentina in South America . 

Threats:

The South Florida population has collapsed due to agricultural expansions and altered hydrocycles  .  Wood storks need normal flooding to increase prey population with a natural drawdown to concentrate prey in one area.  Successful breeding depends on normal hydrocycles.  The drainage of cypress stands prevents the wood stork from nesting, and promotes predation from raccoons . 

Conservation and Management

The wood stork is protected by the U.S. Migratory Bird Treaty Act.  It is also protected as a Threatened species by the Federal Endangered Species Act and as a Federally-designated Threatened species by Florida’s Endangered and Threatened Species Rule. The wood stork was reclassified by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on June 30, 2014, from Endangered to Threatened. Source:

http://myfwc.com/wildlifehabitats/imperiled/profiles/birds/wood-stork/

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Video: Wood Stork

Red Shouldered Hawk Eating Black Racer Snake

Video:  Red Shouldered Hawk Eating Black Racer Snake

A beautiful Red Shouldered Hawk has caught a Black Racer Snake and proceeds to eat it on a dead pine branch in the Backyard. Hawks sit on fences and watch for young snakes active in  the daytime - not only are they easy to catch, but they are like tender gourmet food for the hawks. 

The Red-shouldered Hawk is one of the most beautiful and distinctively marked hawks in North America. Adults are barred with rusty-red on the underparts and have bright rufous shoulders. Their underparts are dark brown, and the tail is black with 4 or 5 narrow white bands. When in flight, pale crescents in the wings are visible from below. They breed from northern California south to Baja, in the Midwestern United States east to New Brunswick; and south to the Florida Keys and Texas. Habitat. In Florida, Red-Shouldered Hawks nest in a wide variety of woodland habitats, but they are particularly identified with cypress swamps and river bottomlands. It most frequently still-hunts from a relatively low, inconspicuous perch but may also forage from a low, coursing flight (Palmer 1988; Johnsgard 1990). Its diet is characterized by sluggish, easily captured animals, such as toads, frogs, snakes, rodents, and small birds and their nestlings (Kimmel and Frederickson 1981, Palmer 1988, Kale and Maehr 1990). Typical nest sites are located in large mature trees with good canopy cover. A bulky well-built nest is usually placed a little more than halfway up the tree in a major fork (Kimmel and Frederickson 1981, Bednarz and Dinsmore 1982, Palmer 1988). Usually two whitish eggs marked with brown are laid and incubated for approximately 33 days. The young birds fledge at 40 to 45 days of age (Palmer 1988; Johnsgard 1990). Seasonal Occurrence. In Florida, Red-shouldered Hawks breed from January through May (Kale and Maehr 1990), or through June (B. Millsap, pers. commun.). Most birds reside in Florida, but the states' population is augmented in September and October by fall migrants from northern states. 

Source: http://legacy.myfwc.com/bba/docs/bba_RSHA.pdf

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Video:  Red Shouldered Hawk Eating Black Racer Snake

Gray Squirrels Marking Territory

Video:  Gray Squirrels Marking Territory

Gray Squirrels urine mark profusely over four days on a wooden tabletop in the Backyard which has become a new territorial boundary marker. Setting up a camera trap for Blue Jays I have been training resulted in an unexpected amazing discovery of just how much territory marking Gray Squirrels do - and how critical their sense of smell is to communication. You will learn perhaps more than you ever wanted to know about how Gray Squirrels use their sense of smell to communicate. The large oak tree seen in the background of all the videos has been their traditional territorial boundary marker - but after the wooden table was in the Backyard for about a week for the Blue Jays the Gray Squirrels apparently adopted it as a new key position marker and checkpoint in their territorial geography database. Watch in amazement - BTW this is not just a male thing - the females can mark with the best of them! 

Squirrels mark territory with scent and may actively defend that territory in direct interactions.  Gray squirrels have two main scent marking tools, urine and scent glands near the mouth.  They will frequently urinate as they move along travel routes and they often stop and rub their oral scent glands as well.  When two squirrels meet they will greet each other by sniffing these oral scent glands, sometimes placing their hands on the other squirrels shoulders, which gives the appearance of kissing and hugging and has given rise to many a novelty greeting card photo.

The second main territorial marking method gray squirrels is chewing a large vertical stripe on a large dominant tree in their territory and using this visual marking as a scent marking post.  All squirrels passing by this stripe will stop and smell who has been around and add marks of their own.  These marks are often maintained for generations (squirrel generations that is).

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Video:  Gray Squirrels Marking Territory

Portuguese Man o' War invades Florida Beaches

Large Portuguese Man o' War  wash up on Florida Beaches - a scallop shell for scale.

Portuguese man o' war invades Florida Beaches. Steady east winds have driven them onshore east central Florida since late December and into the New Year. The Atlantic Portuguese man o' war, also known as the Man-of-war, bluebottle, or floating terror, has venomous tentacles and can deliver a painful sting. If they are on the beaches one can assume they are in the water and hundreds of people have been reported stung! I took this photograph on December 31st. 

Strong winds may drive them into bays or onto beaches. Often the finding of a single Portuguese man o' war results in the finding of many others in the vicinity. They must be treated with caution, and the discovery of a man o' war washed up on a beach may lead to the closure of the whole beach.

The Atlantic Portuguese man o' war (Physalia physalis), also known as the Man-of-war, bluebottle, or floating terror, is a marine cnidarian of the family Physaliidae. Its venomous tentacles can deliver a painful sting. Despite its outward appearance, the Portuguese man o' war is not a common jellyfish but a siphonophore, which is not actually a single multicellular organism, but a colony of specialized minute individuals called zooids. These zooids are attached to one another and physiologically integrated to the extent that they are incapable of independent survival. The name "man o' war" comes from the man-of-war, an 18th-century armed sailing ship, and the cnidarian's supposed resemblance to the Portuguese version at full sail. In other languages it is simply known as the 'Portuguese war-ship' (Dutch: portugees oorlogsschip, Swedish: portugisisk örlogsman, Norwegian: portugisisk krigsskip, Finnish: portugalinsotalaiva), the 'Portuguese galley' (German: portugiesische Galeere, Hungarian: portugál gálya), the 'Portuguese caravel' (Portuguese: caravela portuguesa, Spanish: carabela portuguesa, Italian: caravella portoghese), or the 'Portuguese little boat' (Russian: португальский кораблик).

The Atlantic Portuguese man o' war lives at the surface of the ocean. The gas-filled bladder, or pneumatophore, remains at the surface, while the remainder is submerged. Since the Portuguese man o' war has no means of propulsion, it is moved by a combination of winds, currents, and tides. Although it is most commonly found in the open ocean in tropical and subtropical regions, it has been found as far north as the Bay of Fundy and the Hebrides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war

Nine Banded Armadillo Up Close

Video: Nine Banded Armadillo Up Close

Close-up of a large Florida Armadillo hunting for insects. I find them cute, especially their ears! Backyard Armadillos are always nocturnal - this one was along a canal bank in the afternoon and  so focused on hunting in the grass that it didn't notice me standing right above it with the camera until it almost bumped into me - they have really poor eyesight.

Approximately 20 species of armadillo exist, but the nine-banded is the only one found in the United States. The term “armadillo” means “little armored one,” and refers to the presence of bony, armor-like plates covering their body. Despite their name, nine-banded armadillos can have 7 to 11 bands on their armor. There is a common misconception that nine-banded armadillos can roll up into spherical balls. In reality, only two species of armadillo (both three-banded) roll up completely.

Size: Nine-banded armadillos are about 2.5 feet long from the nose to the tip of the tail and weigh an average of 12 pounds.

Diet: They are generalist feeders and use their sense of smell to track down almost 500 different foods, most of which are insects and invertebrates such as beetles, cockroaches, wasps, yellow jackets, fire ants, scorpions, spiders, snails, and white grubs. A lesser part of the diet is comprised of small reptiles and amphibians and mammal, reptile, and bird eggs. Less than 10 percent of the diet is from fruit, seeds, fungi, and other plant matter.

Typical Lifespan: Nine-banded armadillos typically live from 7 to 20 years in the wild. One captive armadillo lived 23 years.

Habitat: They prefer warm, wet climates and live in forested or grassland habitats. Small streams are no obstacle for these amazing animals! The nine-banded can hold its breath for up to six minutes and can swim or “walk” along the bottom of rivers. Their abandoned burrows are utilized by other animals, such as pine snakes, rabbits, opossums, mink, cotton rats, striped skunks, burrowing owls, and eastern indigo snakes.

Range: Nine-banded armadillos are found in the southeastern United States, but their range has been expanding continually northward for over one hundred years. A few have even been spotted as far north as Illinois and Nebraska! Armadillos have not yet reached the full extent of their possible range, which one study has predicted may reach as far north as Massachusetts. Climate warming caused by increasing carbon in the atmosphere will further expand their potential range.

Life History and Reproduction: Nine-banded armadillos almost always give birth to four identical quadruplets. At birth, the carapace of the offspring has not yet hardened and the unprotected young are extremely vulnerable to predation.

Armor helps to protect armadillos from predators such as pumas, black bears, and alligators. Nine-banded armadillos are nocturnal, and spend their waking time burrowing or feeding. They often have a bad reputation due to the fact that they are the only animal other than humans that can contract leprosy, but cases of humans getting leprosy by handling armadillos are extremely rare.

Fun Fact:

Armadillos have long been a source of food for humans. The nine-banded was nicknamed “Hoover hog” and “poor man’s pork” by people who blamed President Hoover for the Great Depression.

Conservation Status: Increasing. Humans have killed off most of their natural predators, and roadways have offered them easier means of travel to new habitats. Nine-banded armadillos have a tendency to jump straight up into the air when they are startled. This often leads to their demise on highways. They are small enough that cars can pass right over them, but they leap up and hit the undercarriage of vehicles. They are also poisoned, shot, or captured by people that consider them lawn and agricultural pests. Some are eaten or used for the curio trade.

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Video: Nine Banded Armadillo Up Close

Anhinga or Snakebird

Video: Anhinga or Snakebird

The Anhinga or snakebird swims with just its head and neck above water and looks somewhat like a snake - and when wet and just out of the water it looks rather dark and unexciting, but when this magnificent bird perches to dry and clean its feathers in the sun its stunning beauty can be fully appreciated. One of the most spectacular birds to ever grace the area behind the Backyard it is generally only found in Florida and the immediate Gulf Coast of the USA in winter. The anhinga (/ænˈhɪŋɡə/; Anhinga anhinga), sometimes called snakebird, darter, American darter, or water turkey, is a water bird of the warmer parts of the Americas. The word anhinga comes from the Brazilian Tupi language and means devil bird or snake bird. When swimming the origin of the name snakebird is apparent: only the colored neck appears above water so the bird looks like a snake ready to strike. They do not have external nares (nostrils) and breathe solely through their epiglottis.

The anhinga is placed in the darter family, Anhingidae, and is closely related to Indian (Anhinga melanogaster), African (A. rufa), and Australian (A. novaehollandiae) darters. Like other darters, the anhinga hunts by spearing fishes and other small prey using its sharp, slender beak.

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Video: Anhinga or Snakebird

Wild Monk Parakeets or Quaker Parrots

Video: Wild Monk Parakeets or Quaker Parrots

Flock of wild or feral Monk Parakeets also called Quaker Parrots feeding on wild fruit along a canal on a cool windy day. Hardy, introduced birds they can survive even much further north than Florida. In past years wild or feral  Blue Crowned Conures have visited the Backyard:  https://youtu.be/Lau6U10vCPo

The Monk Parakeet (Myiopsitta monachus) is a member of the parrot family (Psittacidae). Unlike most members of the parrot family, which eat mostly seeds and nest in cavities (such as tree holes), Monk Parakeets also eat a variety of fruits and are the only parrot species that builds nests out of sticks.

Monk Parakeets are small to medium-sized parrots, approximately 12 inches long (29 cm) with a wingspan of 20 inches (53 cm) and weigh 3–4 ounces (90–120 g). These small parrots are brightly colored (Fig. 1); their thick beaks are yellow-brown, their backs (including the backs of their heads) and tails are bright green, and their flight feathers are blue to bluish-black. In contrast, their faces, throats, chests, and legs are pale gray. The plumage of Monk Parakeets is similar in both sexes throughout the year; juveniles may be brighter green. Monk Parakeets are noisy birds whose calls have been described as metallic, rasping squawks and screams.

In the 1960s, Monk Parakeets became extremely popular in the pet trade, and by the end of the decade United States' imports had increased to more than 16,000 Monk Parakeets per year! Reports of free-ranging individuals date back to the 1960s, when wild Monk Parakeets were reported from cities across the country. Many of these birds are believed to have escaped from damaged shipping crates, whereas others accidentally escaped from their owners or from zoos, or were intentionally released. Monk Parakeets were first documented nesting in Florida in 1969.

source: https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/uw302

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Video: Wild Monk Parakeets or Quaker Parrots

Male Queen Butterfly

Video: Male Queen Butterfly

Male Queen Butterfly (Danaus gilippus) with the two dark upper wing spots - or pheromone scales. Queen butterflies are cousins of  Monarch butterflies and similar to Soldier Butterflies. The Queen's are year-round residents of Florida, but my experience has been they are not that common to see and equally as beautiful as the Monarchs.  Both use milkweed (Asclepias species) as host plants. 

Queen butterflies are not like ants and termites, the ones that lay the eggs. ‘Queen’ is simply the name of this species of butterfly. There are both male and female Queen butterflies. Like Monarchs, male Queens have a black spot on each hindwing. These black dots are pheromone scales. Although Monarch butterflies do not use pheromones during courtship and mating, Queen butterflies do use pheromones.

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Video: Male Queen Butterfly

Great Blue Heron Eats Large Fish

Video: Great Blue Heron Eats Large Fish

Video: Great Blue Heron Eats Large Fish

Great Blue Heron spears a large Mullet and then quickly swallows it and washed it down with a few sips of water. Great Blue Herons are some of the largest birds in Florida and are always fascinating to watch as they patiently stalk their prey and often spear it with their sharp bill.

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 Video: Great Blue Heron Eats Large Fish

Squirrel Mother and Father - Tender Moments - Beautiful Music

Video: Squirrel Mother and Father - Tender Moments - Beautiful Music

Gray Squirrel Parents show incredible tenderness with the father attending to grooming and massaging the Mother who has been nursing three kittens for almost two months and no doubt needs some attention. It is very rare to capture this parent bonding behavior on film. This kind of non-sexual interest in the Mother's well-being is rather striking and charming and implies there is much more to squirrels than just base "animal" instincts. Typically the male who in this case is the "Bull Squirrel of the Backyard" has nothing to do with raising the young and is rather gruff - see  - Male Gray Squirrel Dominance Behavior  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFl2v0rO1zw

The story of this incredible mother raising her three Kits whom she spends a lot of time grooming and cleaning to keep them healthy in the cramped nest is at this Playlist:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9ODW2GQ3n8J5c5QH_0U05TwHnttEBnMW

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Video: Squirrel Mother and Father - Tender Moments - Beautiful Music