It's Not Just About the Birds

Tricolored Heron

I got into birding through my love of nature photography. After moving to Florida birds became my chief photographic subject. I fell in love with their beauty as well as the challenge of learning to find and identify them.  To this day, when I go out into nature, my top priorities are birding and bird photography.  But over the last few years, I've also become fascinated with other forms of wildlife that I sometimes encounter while birding.  I'm still a bit of a novice at non-bird wildlife, but at risk of deviating too far off this blogs topic of the fun of birding, I thought I'd share a little bit of the non-bird wildlife I've been enjoying learning about.

I love butterflies.  Especially when the birding is slow, it's fun to see what may be fluttering about. At first my process was to photograph first and then consult field guides later.  Recently, though, I discovered a wonderful website, e-butterfly.org.  It's the butterfly equivalent of eBird, and it has encouraged me to learn more about butterflies.

Zebra Swallowtail

Zebra Longwing

Dragonflies have been a bigger challenge for me.  Thankfully, there's a wonderful site called odonatacentral.org. You can record your sightings, but there is also a section to help you identify dragonflies and damselfles.

Marl Pennant

Seaside Dragonlet

Halloween Pennant

By far my favorite website for insects is bugguide.net.  They have a fantastic online guide to help you identify just about any bug you might find in the U.S.  And even better, you can submit photographs for identification.  This allowed me to find out that the digger wasp in the photo below is of the species Sphex jamaicensis.

Digger Wasp with Katydid

It's not hard to distract me from birding for a few minutes at the sight of a turtle. They are fascinating creatures.  To help me learn how to identify turtles, I've been making use of http://www.empireoftheturtle.com/florida_turtle.htm and http://www.wildflorida.com/florida_turtles.php

Gopher Tortoise

Peninsula Cooter

There's another website that I've found helpful for lizards. It's called http://www.wildflorida.com/florida_lizards.php. My personal favorites are the Five-lined Skink and Six-lined Racerunner.

Five-lined Skink

Six-lined Racerunner

There are also some wonderful mammals to see. A good site for mammals is http://www.wildflorida.com/florida_mammals.php.

Bobcat

River Otter