One thing I love about visiting my mother in Florida is the birds. Going ‘home’ to St. Anastasia island is like visiting a bird sanctuary. While most tourists pay the Alligator Farm entrance fee to see such avian variety in one place, we just look out the living room window.
My mother lives in a master-planned golf-course community constructed from reclaimed land on salt marsh and coastal hammock. The home sites were once so dense with palmetto palms and shrub oaks that one could get lost after walking a few steps in. Now the marsh is fringed with houses stamped on Bermuda grass. It’s a necklace of roof shingles and Lanais—those fancy screened-in pool enclosures that keep the bugs out.
While many of the homes face out to the golden expanse of coastal marsh skirting the inter-coastal waterway, my mother has a view of the golf course. The planners left a narrow band of natural vegetation and wooded islands to bracket the fairways and putting greens. The few pines that survived years of hurricane battering are rookery for some of my feathered favorites.
After dinner, when most golfers have put away their clubs, we take a barefoot walk across the carpet-like green to see what’s happening:
On the other side of the irrigation pond, a cluster of birds stands as tall as a group of grade-schoolers. It’s a motley crew of long-beaked wood storks, roseate spoonbills (not to be confused with flamingos), small white egrets, and a triplet of turkey vultures with their wings outstretched in a vulgar display of dark feathers.
Wood ducks and their less exotic mallard friends swim suspiciously away from us. Looking down to our feet, we find a cluster of translucent scales that look like overgrown toenails. The detritus is probably all that’s left of a golf club carp, picked apart by a raptor. And the scraggly-looking bald eagle we just disturbed from his pine snag perch was likely the contented diner.
A rustling above us diverts our attention to movement in the canopy of twin pines. It’s a pair of mating Great Blue heron, carefully tending a twiggy nest. We hear the young inside but only see the slow and deliberate motion of slate blue wings. It reminds me of the many nests— often three of four per tree—that dotted the treetops in a preserved patch of pine forest at Rice University’s historic entryway.
I must have noticed them while working on an undergraduate architecture project located along a tattered stretch of salt marsh leading to Galveston Island. I was hoping to convert derelict billboard structures into wetland observation platforms. Apparently, the Rice University herons fly forty miles each morning to the gulf estuaries to feed and provide food for their young. I remember being impressed at this daily commute and still wonder: Do herons mate for life? Are the Rice herons still there? Is heron habitat in Houston in high demand?
However, on this last trip home, the bird that most captured my imagination was one I don’t remember seeing before. A black and white bird, the size of a large gull, with a scissor-tail like a swallow, cut invisible arcs over my head. Out of the cavernous and often inaccessible recesses of my elusive memory surfaced the name “kite.”
Sure enough, ‘swallow-tailed kite’ was easy to find in Sibley’s Guide to Birds and described simply as, “Unmistakable, incredibly graceful, flowing flight. Plucks insects and lizards from treetops.” Of course! The screened-in Lanais fringing the golf course and marsh were the perfect snack bar of tasty lizards and creepy crawlers—the nouveau woodland fringe habitat!
Top 5 Favorite Things To Do in St. Augustine, FL
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- Climb the St. Augustine Historic Lighthouse
- Shop at the Saturday Farmer’s Market at the Outdoor Amphitheatre
- Discover the hidden Greek Chapel while strolling historic St. Augustine
- Ride beach cruisers at low tide on St. Anastasia Island
- Birdwatch at the Alligator Farm (if you’re not staying at my mom’s!:-)
Inside St. Photios Greek Orthodox National Shrine in historic St. Augustine.
Hand-made stamps from Rajasthan, India, found at the Saturday Farmers Market at the Outdoor Amphitheatre
Beach cruisers and bocce ball: A day at the beach on St. Anastasia Island
An evening stroll through Flagler College Campus in historic St. Augustine, FL.
Throwback photo from Christmas 2008, the last time I actually climbed the lighthouse!