Flying Lessons essay

Florida is a head-spinning place to go birding. One day you’re chasing a flock of Roseate Spoonbills across 140,000 acres of pristine wetlands, and the next you’re watching Purple Gallinules forage in a ditch a short jaunt from a Starbucks.

Roseate Spoonbill / Photos by Andes Gyllenhaal

A few weeks ago, we tracked Endangered Red-cockaded Woodpeckers through a state park without meeting another soul. On nearby Interstate 95, two Sandhill Cranes grazed on the grassy shoulder as traffic whizzed by a few feet away.

The Florida peninsula has a rich avian landscape, home to more than 500 species, found from the mangroves in the Keys to the Panhandle’s oak hammocks. An impressive 10 million acres of parks, refuges, and other protected areas are managed for conservation.

Sandhill Crane

But Florida is on a collision course with its birds. People and birds tend to like to live in the same places here, and with 21 million residents, Florida now ranks as the third-most-populated state.

It’s fascinating, so Florida became the first stop on our five-month road trip around the country — a birding safari of sorts. In January, we packed up our Airstream trailer, gathered binoculars and cameras, and headed south from our home in North Carolina.

This is a new column running in the latest issue of American Bird Conservancy magazine and is reprinted here with permission from the Bird Conservation quarterly. The column, under the name Flying Lessons, is meant to build on our travels to explore what we’re learning from birds. While we’ve had to put off our birding trips for the time being, we hope to be back on the road before long. We’ll post these columns as they appear. You can get a subscription to the magazine if you donate $40 or more to the conservancy. Here’s the donation link. Finally, if you’d like to see the column as it’s running in the spring edition of the magazine, you can find it here.