A different kind of Tweet

The president of the Tropical Audubon Society took me for a bird walk yesterday. It was a fascinating three hour exercise in patience and leg strength.

Once a year the Society offers Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden volunteers their own opportunity to travel the Garden's Kushlan Bird Trail under the guidance of its president, Joe Barros. Saturday was a decidedly overcast day with lots of rain on the radar, so when I turned up at the designated time of 8am, I was joined by only three other volunteers and Stephanie Bott, the staff person in charge of volunteers.

Joe Barros describes himself as an ardent, even obsessed, "birder". In his other life he is a practicing dentist, but on this morning he is in full "birder" mode, equipped with high powered binoculars and an iPhone app that provides us with instant close ups of the birds we are looking for as well as the sounds of their tweets.

Joe is a master at "phishing". . .the art of making weird sounds that immitate bird calls and attract the real thing to respond in kind. Although the Kushlan Bird Trail has a definite route that people are supposed to follow, Joe doesn't believe the birds always agree with the map. So we find ourselves slogging through the muddy undergrowth of the area known as the Keys Habitat and crisscrossing the Lowlands to inaccessible spots where various species of birds are known to hang out.

The last time I went bird watching was in Africa with my then 9-year old grandson. (Adam recently turned 33, so you get the picture that I might be a little rusty in this department.) Either my binoculars were stronger then, or my vision isn't quite so sharp, but I did manage to spot and focus on an amazing variety of avian life, including my beloved anhinga that I just finished painting in my art class. (See attached photos.)

Volunteering at Fairchild continues to open new areas of interest for me. I reccommend it highly. I have to go out on my 7th floor balcony now and tell that feathered creature sitting on my railing. .the one that likes to scare my cats. . . that he isn't just any old bird, he's actually a fish crow, native to Florida.

I wonder if he knows that.
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