Pat's Wildways: Birds on the Greenway

There are lots of birds on the Ron Sapp Egans Creek Greenway year-round and now, with the weather becoming cooler, it’s a great time to look for them.

You can hardly walk a quarter of a mile before seeing a great egret or a few of them. Although these birds roost together at night elsewhere, during the day, they spread out around the Greenway in their individual favorite spots to look for aquatic prey, bugs, and the like to feed on. These large white birds might be “common,” but there’s nothing common about their sleek profile, their graceful movements, and their innate stillness as they watch and wait for anything edible to pass nearby.

Great blue herons are also regular inhabitants of the Greenway. Often, one is positioned on a bank looking for fish, and sometimes they even stake out their feeding area amidst the aquatic vegetation. These large birds are also regular visitors to many retention ponds on Amelia Island. Like the egrets, these birds have a regular territory and become known to homeowners when they appear every day to fish the ponds.

The spillway along Jasmine Street between the north and south sections of the Greenway is a great place to watch a variety of egret and heron species. Little blue herons, snowy egrets, and tricolored herons often join their larger cousins to hang out there as well.

Although herons and egrets are highly visible and fun to watch there are many other interesting birds to be found on the Greenway too. One of my favorites are the anhingas. These solitary black birds are often visible with wings spread drying out on a branch. Since they lack the waterproofing oil glands that ducks have, they become waterlogged when chasing their prey. This adaptation and their heavy bones help them stay submerged in water, but they need to dry out afterward. In water they swim using their webbed feed and snatch fish by darting their long neck and pointed bill towards their prey, giving them a place in the Darter family of birds. Because their body is submerged except for their long neck that sticks up from the water, they have also earned the nickname “snakebird.” When disturbed, anhingas make a metallic sound, a clanking of sorts, that is distinctive for sure. Cormorants, with a similar profile, less vivid markings and shorter necks and tails also sometimes show up on the Greenway. And during some seasons, the Greenway also hosts other water birds, like various ducks, pied-billed grebes and hooded mergansers.

Pileated woodpeckers are also often seen and heard along the Greenway as they knock on trees looking for insects. These are the classic “Woody Woodpecker” bird with distinct black and white markings and a predominant red crest. Pileated woodpeckers are a problem for our utility companies since they sometimes choose a telephone pole to drill into to make a nesting cavity, thus weakening the pole. If you drive along Pogy Road towards the Dee Dee Bartels Boat Ramp, you can see the utility company efforts to cover the holes these birds start on the poles. The red-bellied woodpecker and other species also call the Greenway home, but they are smaller and more difficult to spot for most of us.

And then there are the myriad other species in the Greenway that attract birdwatchers from all over. Right now it is migrating season for a diversity of warblers that can be seen flitting through the shrubbery and trees. On a recent walk in the Greenway I met an avid birdwatcher with a large telephoto camera who was happily photographing these tiny birds in large magnification. She showed me one of her photos, and I could see why she was excited. With my naked eyes, they are just small brown birds, but with her lens, they are strikingly marked with splashes of yellow that identify them, or at least identify them for those in the know, but not me alas.

You never know what you will see when you take a stroll on the Greenway but it’s always worth a look and always interesting. Check it out, and maybe I’ll see you there!

Pat Foster-Turley, Ph.D., is a zoologist on Amelia Island. She welcomes your nature questions and observations. [email protected]