Alabama and Mississippi Gulf Coast, November 2011

An impromptu business trip to the Mississippi Gulf coast gave me a little opportunity to add some statebirds for both my MS and AL lists.  Luckily I’ve birded both coasts before so I know the areas fairly well.  Plus I got excellent directions and advice from several very helpful local birders.  Although I have quite a number of possible new statebirds in both states, they are scattered in a number of different habitats.  So with limited birding time, I needed to prioritize the locations target just a couple key spots.  I was already reportable in both states, though I was less over the ABA threshold in AL than in MS.  So although my work location was in MS, I chose to do most of my birding in AL.

In Alabama I first headed to Dauphin Island in hopes of several shorebirds.  There I was successful in adding 3 new statebirds -

#1 – Snowy Plover – several at Pelican Island and 1 at West End of Dauphin Island

#2 – Marbled Godwit – 1 way out on Pelican Island (4 mile round trip walk!)

#3 – Nelson’s Sparrow – just 1 at the Dauphin Island airport

I also found and photographed a 1^st year Lesser Black-backed Gull there – though it wasn’t new for my AL list.

The next day I had a brief couple hours available at dawn and headed to the Mud Lakes Blakely Island impoundments again for shorebirds.  There I found another new statebird - Long-Billed Dowitcher – 20+ in one impoundment.  I had hopes for several others, but no luck.  Though I did find another rarity that wasn’t new to my AL statelist – an adult Vermillion Flycatcher (see photo below).  I was told that this was the first one in AL for a number of years.

Then over to work on the MS coast.  Had no real time for birding, but I needed White-winged Dove for MS, so I decided to drive around the local town a bit to try for one sitting on an exposed perch somewhere.  Within a couple minutes I found one on some telephone wires.

Then back to the Mobile, AL airport to fly home.  But first I had an hour to try for a Green-tailed Towhee that was spotted the day before at a feeder just a short distance from the airport.  (A Black-chinned Hummingbird was there too, but I already had that one for my AL list.)  The Towhee showed up at the feeder just a few minutes before I needed to go to the airport.  Statebird #5!

That gave me 238 for my AL list and 229 for my MS list.  I’ve copied in below my statebird maps for White-winged Dove and Green-tailed Towhee – 2 birds that I’ve seen in a number of states in their regular western ranges, and a few other atypical states for these species that show up as regular vagrants in the east.