Bunche Beach

Saturday, at 8:00 am the local Audubon group met at Bunche Beach to participate in a serious social gathering with a side of bird watching.  These birders have accumulated so much experience in bird spotting and identification that they can glance at a flying flock of birds and identify the odd man out: it's absolutely amazing.  Then share their past experiences with such birds with good friends.  The actual bird watching is almost casual. For me, it's an entirely different experience, I'm definitely a newbie, and have so much to try to remember.  Yesterday was coolish [12ºC] and very windy on Bunche Beach, a very open beach.  It didn't take long for me to start shivering, so I left early.

I arrived at a very low tide  as you can tell from the next photo.  The washed up wood is at the high tide line, and the low tide waterline is at least a hundred feet or more further off the beach.

This green grass-like stuff is underwater at high tide, but shines with its own glitter and colour when tide's out.  I found it very attractive, hope you do too.

As I mentioned, the tide was out and birds were often quite far away.  Here's a flock exiting stage left as quickly as I could focus...  [my auto-focus quit on this lens...]

Bunche beach has a great view of the bridge to Sanibel Island.  Click on any picture to see all of them larger, and in this one, the skies are full of birds.

Due to the cool winds, there seemed to be less birds than usual, and as I mentioned, most were far away.  Footprints were everywhere, many belonged to birds.  Don't make any bets, but I think these were made by semi-palmated plovers. [I overheard Phyllis mentioning their flock].

As you can see, their footprints are very similar to little arrows, in every direction possible.  Maybe the arrows explain why they always seem to be wandering around quickly in all directions.   ... or maybe it's the wandering that make the arrows go every which way.  Maybe the grandkids could help me out on this one...