21 Jul Dry Tortugas Spring Bird Migration
I wanted to visit Dry Tortugas National Park long before I understood what or where it was. It sounded exciting – a tropical island far removed from the rest of the Florida Keys and an oasis for marine and bird life. It sounded like my kind of place, and stories of 4’ grouper, 2’ lobsters and flocks of birds that seemingly fell from the sky only reinforced that notion. Yet it took me twenty years to finally get there. I hadn’t tried particularly hard the first 10 years or so, but in more recent history I’d booked two trips that both failed in one way or another due to bad weather. I half expected another failure when I booked a third attempt this spring. I stared at Fort Jefferson’s brick walls in disbelief as our anchor chain creaked into the adjacent water. I’d finally made it, and the cacophony of sooty terns, brown noddies, laughing gulls and frigatebirds above suggested I wouldn’t be disappointed.
It was late April, the peak of spring bird migration, and I was not the only birder onsite. A khaki-clad crowd was already gathered around a telescope atop the fort when I landed on Garden Key the next morning. Another binoculared group rounded the corner next to the moat and yet more poured from the ferry upon its arrival. The ‘parade’ (grassy courtyard within the fort walls) crawled with bird watchers, both intentional and unintentional as passing ferry tourists became captivated by the beauty and tameness of the feathered visitors. The rumors were true; It seemed as if flocks of birds had fallen from the sky to fill the trees at Dry Tortugas and, in fact, they had.
The Dry Tortugas are the first sight of land for birds commuting along both the Mississippi and Atlantic flyways from their wintering grounds in South America, Central America and the Caribbean to their breeding grounds in the north. I watched a bank swallow stagger to the moat’s edge and land. It sat motionless, too tired to flee as tourists passed nearby. Those birds not collapsed were busily trying to refuel for the next phase of their journeys. A hooded warbler in its full spring glory landed at my feet, hustling insects across the lawn. A black-and-white warbler worked the gnarled bark of a buttonwood tree within arm’s reach. Bobolinks darted in and out of tall grasses along main walkways. Normally secretive birds seemed oblivious to human observers, and humans aren’t the only ones attune to this situation.
Predatory birds have also discovered the weakened and distracted flocks at Dry Tortugas. A peregrine falcon sat sentry atop the radio tower, watching for easy prey and dragging its kills to an inaccessible ledge along the fort wall. Cattle egrets too have found their way to the islands, plucking up weakened songbirds or preying on eggs and chicks from the array of sooty tern nests concentrated on Bush Key. It’s a darker side of nature, but it’s part of the system. Many of these birds wouldn’t survive the arduous journey even without predatory influences. It’s part of the Dry Tortugas story.
A more appealing part of the Tortugas story is the influence of its unique geographic position on the bird watching. Dry Tortugas is one of the only places in Florida where you can readily see migrants from the Mississippi flyway, species associated with more westerly regions. In general, spring migrants skip much of Florida in their rush to get north to re-establish territories for mating season so views of breeding plumage in most parts of Florida are rare. Palm Warblers and Cape May Warblers, birds I recognize in the fall, dazzled and befuddled me in their unfamiliar colors and patterns as they flit about Fort Jefferson. Given the Tortugas’ post at the cusp of the tropics, many tropical species not seen elsewhere in Florida or North America occur on these islands. They host the only nesting colonies of masked boobies. magnificent frigatebirds, sooty terns and brown noddies in North America. It’s an exciting place to be and as I watched the last few terns drop from view as we pulled away three days later, I was grateful that I hadn’t given up.
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