{"id":11965,"date":"2023-04-15T23:41:09","date_gmt":"2023-04-16T03:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=11965"},"modified":"2023-04-18T07:24:11","modified_gmt":"2023-04-18T11:24:11","slug":"dauphin-island-day-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2023\/04\/15\/dauphin-island-day-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Dauphin Island: Day One"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It’s rare that I’m able to scout a new tour on exactly the same dates set for the tour proper\u2014but it’s worked out just right as I make preparations for next year’s new VENT tour of Alabama’s Gulf Coast<\/a>. We’ll be back a year from today, and I hope that the trip’s first day is as exciting as this first day of reconnaissance was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The day started mighty early, with a 3:10 am departure for Newark. The flight to Houston was uneventful (or least I slept through whatever eventfulness there may have been), but the connecting trip on to Mobile was bumpy, boding ill, I feared, for the weather here in Alabama. And in fact, the rest of the day on Mobile Bay and Dauphin Island was unsettled, with occasional light rain giving way mid-afternoon to almost two hours of steady pelting. But it didn’t bother the birds, and so it didn’t bother us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I won’t list the sites and the 80+ bird species we found at each\u2014eBird’s new Trip Report<\/a> feature makes that unnecessary\u2014but there were plenty of notable experiences on this, my first visit to Dauphin Island. A brief visit to Shell Mounds at the end of the day, after being rained most vigorously out earlier, revealed an apparent small arrival of passerines, including blue-winged <\/strong>and prothonotary warblers, blue grosbeaks, <\/strong>and orchard orioles.<\/strong> A walk out the Dauphin Island Pier produced a singing sedge wren <\/strong>and a dozen eastern kingbirds<\/strong>; the flooded playground there gave us spectacularly close views of least <\/strong>and semipalmated sandpipers <\/strong>and dunlins<\/strong>. Even more dramatic was a female-type magnificent frigatebird<\/strong> riding the wind just above Fort Gaines, at the eastern end of the island. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tomorrow takes us to more sites and more birds\u2014and I’ll try to write again afterwards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s rare that I’m able to scout a new tour on exactly the same dates set for the tour proper\u2014but it’s worked out just right as I make preparations for next year’s new VENT tour of Alabama’s Gulf Coast. We’ll be back a year from today, and I hope that the trip’s first day is … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Dauphin Island: Day One”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11965"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11965"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11977,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11965\/revisions\/11977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}