On Sunday, the 27th, Stephen Kloiber and I left my house around 11:30 AM and headed for Sunrise, Florida. Because of the extremely heavy traffic caused by everyone returning home from Christmas visits, a drive that should have taken about 19 hours turned into 21-3/4 hours. On the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, we hit one of many major backups, but the amazing thing about this one was that it was caused by everyone "rubbernecking" at a single Wild Turkey that was feeding in the median. We finally arrived at Markham Park near Sunrise, Florida at around 8:15 AM on Monday morning just as a small cloudburst occurred. Once the rain subsided, it only took us around a half-hour of searching until we got looks at the Western Spindalis that had been there since late November. I was very happy to get some photos of this Bahamian bird.
There were six Spot-breasted Orioles associating with it.
We left the park and drove to the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. There, we found two flocks of Monk Parakeets.
While taking photos of them, I noticed a hawk circling nearby, which surprisingly turned out to be a Short-tailed Hawk.
The water levels of the impoundments were pretty high, so the number of birds in them were pretty disappointing.
Next, we checked a couple spots in the Boynton Beach area for Nanday Parakeet but came up empty both times. At dusk, we headed north to the Melbourne area where we got a motel and crashed after being up for about 33 hours.
December 29-30, 2015
On Tuesday, the 29th, we birded Ritch Grissom Memorial Wetlands near Viera, Florida. There were many birds in and around the several impoundments.
We left there around noon and began the long drive back home, which was fine other than the occasional patches of thick fog that we ran into. We returned at around 4 AM on Wednesday morning, 2,585 miles later.
