Spruce Creek Park
We were out today with the Southeast Volusia Audubon Society on our Tuesday morning bird walk. Today’s location was Spruce Creek Park in Port Orange, Florida. The park features a picturesque creek that invites visitors to enjoy fishing, kayaking, and in our case, wonderful opportunities for excellent birding. Our main target today was the Clapper rail. This wide expanse of brackish wetland provides exceptional habitat for these wading birds, and if you spend any amount of “quiet time” along the boardwalk out to the fishing pier, you are bound to hear if not see these elusive skulkers.
Clapper rails are medium-sized wading birds belonging to the Rallidae family. They possess a long, slender body, a slightly curved bill, and long toes that enable them to navigate through dense vegetation. The old saying “Skinny as a rail” actually originated as a reference to this bird’s physique. Their plumage is generally a mix of brown, gray, and rufous colors, providing effective camouflage against the mangroves, reeds and grasses in which they dwell. . These birds are elusive by nature often relying on their stealth to evade predators and making them a challenging subject for both birdwatchers and photograpahers alike. Clapper rails are known for their distinctive vocalizations, which include a series of sharp clattering calls that resonate through their wetland environments. To hear the typical call of the clapper, click on the action button below.
The most prominent bird of the morning was the ubiquitous Brown pelican. Brown pelicans can be found up and down the east coast of the United States during the warm summer months but are pretty much confined to an area south of the Virginia during the winter. A plunge diver, this bird will soar above the water in search of fish until it spots its prey. At that point, it goes into a steep dive at high speeds, plunging into the water scooping up a pouch full of water and hopefully fish. It tilts its bill down to drain the water from its bill and then swallows what’s left…..lunch! Mother Nature has provided the Brown pelican with an airbag in its breast to help absorb the impact of diving down from heights of 50 - 60 feet.
When in the Sunshine State, one bird you are likely to see at anytime of year is the petite Blue-Gray gnatcatcher. In spite of the fact that you can find these birds in Florida all year round, it’s believed that they are all migratory, so the birds you’ll see here in summer are not the same birds that are here now! The males will head north to the breeding grounds as far north as New York before the ladies, but the females will be soon to follow. A good birding buddy of mine hit the nail on the head when he rated this little beauty a perfect “10” on the Avian cuteness scale.
Tech Tip - The weather this morning was quite dreary with drizzle and heavy cloud cover. It was therefore necessary to open up the lens to the widest aperture (f/4.5 on the Nikon Z100-400 I had mounted on the Z8 today.) As such, you have 2 choices to get a decent exposure. You have to slow down the shutter speed or increase the sensor sensitivity (ISO). Higher ISO is going to give you a lot of grain under these dark conditions, so I want to keep the ISO as low as possible. Fortunately, the rail was barely moving. Rails will remain as motionless as possible especially if they sense a nearby presence (like 10 anxious birders scurrying around for a better look from the boardwalk directly above them!) With the subject barely moving, I could easily lower my shutter speed to 1/400 of a second as I did here with no worry of shaking due to the Vibration Reduction built into the lens and body. This is why I strongly recommend learning to shoot in manual rather than letting the camera do what it wants in AUTO.
