Bunche Beach and hanging out poolside in Florida – 2/21/2022
by Bill Gadbow
Chris and I got a great deal for eight nights at the La Quinta in Fort Myers Beach on Summerlin Road. It has the best pool in the area, and we spent days sitting poolside, swimming a few occasional laps, and soaking in the hot tub. It is also near some really good restaurants, and I am sad to say that I gained five pounds during the visit. We can HIGHLY recommend the Summerlin Cafe on Summerlin Square Drive, Fort Meyers Beach. We went there three times in a week. It has lots of good choices, but we love Greek food, and it has the very best Greek food that we’ve ever had. So, we got that every time. Our only complaints were that the food was too delicious and the portions were too big.
Another great dining find was happy hour at the Lighthouse Waterfront Restaurant on Port Comfort Road, Fort Meyers – just before the Sanibel Causeway. The happy hour plates were nicely priced and delicious. We did our best to support the restaurant by treating ourselves to several of the fancy drinks. A Key Lime Margarita is as good as it sounds.
For seafood, we went to Jerry’s Market on Sanibel Island. Jerry’s is a grocery store with a pleasant little cafe attached. The courtyard view is lush, and the seafood is as fresh as you can get and perfectly prepared. The waiter’s jokes are just okay.
Our hotel was at the intersection of Summerlin Road and John Morris Road. If you drive a mile down John Morris Road, the road dead ends at Bunche Beach which is a pretty nice beach. It is located along San Carlos Bay which protects the beach from the Gulf waves and breezes, so you don’t get the chance to see dolphins like along Fort Meyers Beach or the beaches on Sanibel Island. Those other beaches are wider and thereby more impressive to sit on, but Bunche Beach is a pretty good spot to see shore birds, especially in the morning at low tide. Plus, the parking fee of two dollars per hour is a pretty good rate in this area.
Bunche Beach Sandpipers and Plovers:
It’s always fun to snap photos of these tiny and enthusiastic shore birds. No one can fault sandpipers for their energy. I thought that I had photographed a nice collection of different kinds of plovers because there are at least five kinds found on this beach: Wilson’s Plover, Piping Plover, Snowy Plover, Black-bellied Plover, and the very common Semipalmated Plover. However, I’m fairly confident that all my pics of the little plovers are Piping Plovers, and the bigger plovers are clearly non-breeding Black-bellied Plovers.
Piping Plovers, Bunche Beach, 2/21/2022
I tried to convince myself that the very white sandpipers were Snowy Plovers, but the black legs rule that out. They were non-breeding Sanderlings.
More shore birds at Bunche Beach:
Both Long-billed Dowitchers and Short-billed Dowitchers are found on the Gulf coast in the winter. They are really, really hard to tell apart. I have to be honest here. Even when a bird is definitely identified on the web as either Short or Long, I can’t see the differences. I’m going to guess Short-billed for this bird. The bill is long, but not super long. The bill isn’t too thick at the base. The neck seems a little thick and the pattern of dark spots on the belly seem to be indicative of Short (I think). But I would love it if someone else could jump in and give an opinion on the long or short of it: Long? Or Short?
We were getting ready to leave and go get breakfast (at the Summerlin Cafe!!), when Chris spotted a small flock of birds about two football fields away. It didn’t look like we could get closer because the inlet from a small river dumped into San Carlos Bay in front of where we were standing and there was a wide stretch of what looked like deep water. With the binoculars, we couldn’t identify the birds that Chris had spotted. I snapped a photo and enlarged it in the viewfinder. Enlarged like that, the images were blurry, but I could tell for sure that the birds were terns. I wanted to get closer for a better shot.
I read a long time ago (I think it was in an introduction to a birding book by Sibley) that no shot is valuable enough to be worth risking your camera. I thought about taking my chances, wading through the water to cross the channel, and pictured myself going in deep and dunking my camera. Then I noticed that a few waders seemed to be crossing in shallower water a few hundred yards offshore. I watched until they got all the way across with the water only going up to their waists. I could do that! It was a long wade, but I got across to get closeups of a flock of about twenty Royal Terns. With them was a flock of much smaller shorebirds called Ruddy Turnstones, who were fast asleep. That isn’t easy to do with noisy Royal Terns as your neighbors. In winter, the turnstones are mostly black, but their yellow legs rule out Black Turnstones. Also, Black Turnstones are found only on the west coast. But it wouldn’t have been the first time that I found a bird where he wasn’t supposed to be.
And this guy:
