glosterbirder's Identifications

With Don Fraser; a mostly butterfly trip with Bev Hansen, Clay Black, and others with Hernando Audubon. We walked the main loop only, although I walked the trail to the green barn. The weather at the start was sunny and 64 degrees ("feels like" 64), with calm winds. Don and I met at 0735 and birded for an hour before we met the group at the parking lot at 0900. We were underway by 0920. The primary goal was to find Great Purple Hairstreak, so we concentrated on the three main Sparkleberry patches. We ended up with 18 species of butterflies, including 3 Great Purple Hairstreaks. We left at exactly 1200, and Don and I headed to Sam's Beach Bar at Hudson Beach for lunch.

With Erik Haney, Valeri Ponzo, and several others; a successful chase of the EPIC Piratic Flycatcher found yesterday morning (but not reported for 11 hours). I had begun driving to Fort De Soto Park on my own after work, but I got rear-ended -- with fairly serious damage to Jet in the process -- so I met Erik at his workplace and we drove to the park together. The weather at the start was sunny, 78 degrees ("feels like" 78) and breezy. We spent 1.5+ hours watching/waiting for the flycatcher, which eventually put on a good show. I am including photographs from each viewing session, arranged chronologically after the first (best) image. This is the 3rd (?) record for Florida, and around the 10th record for North America north of Mexico, of this South American austral migrant. Another Piratic Flycatcher was found at Key West on 14 Apr 2024.

Location via Samsung Galaxy A52 cell-phone GPS, accurate within 5 meters, edited to show where the flycatcher was, rather than where we were standing on the trail.

Eventually, we left East Beach Woods and headed to the mulberry tree area to look for (but not find) a Warbling Vireo that was found here yesterday.