Where the birds are

Fort De Soto Park is a prime spring break destination for our feathered friends - and the dedicated birders who track them.

By SUSAN ASCHOFF
Published May 2, 2005

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ST. PETERSBURG - Delivery-truck drivers and construction workers swarm the Circle K on 54th Avenue S before dawn, filling cups with coffee and tanks with gasoline, fueling for the work day ahead.

Roberto Torres grabs a prepackaged apple danish, a cup of coffee and a bottle of Sprite, fueling for a day of walking rutted trails and hopping sandbars, of intense concentration and spastic dashes, at Fort De Soto Park.

Torres is a birder.

There are bird-watchers and there are birders. Bird-watchers look. Birders hunt.

"It's a test of yourself. What will you learn? What will you target?" the Miami resident explains. He and a couple of birding friends in South Florida call themselves "extreme birders." Their pursuit is less hobby and more endurance test. "We run. We drive fast. We joke."

He quips: "We're the militant wing of the South Florida birding community."

From rest stops to resorts

Millions of migratory birds are now in flight, returning from wintering in the Southern Hemisphere to their breeding grounds in the United States and as far north as the Arctic Circle. The journey can cover 10,000 miles. They must stop or drop out of the sky and die of exhaustion.

The bird version of a Circle K is a small park or cemetery offering brief respite. The Nature Conservancy calls these sites "convenience stores."

When poor weather forces an emergency stop, it is known as a "fire escape."

But Fort De Soto is a "full-service hotel." Hotels are locations where nature provides a wide variety of cover and food so large numbers of birds can recuperate. Fort De Soto would get five stars, one of only three significant stops for migrating birds in the United States. The others are the Dry Tortugas (seven tiny islands west of Key West) and Texas.

Torres works on conservation planning for the Nature Conservancy, an international organization dedicated to preserving lands, waters, plants and animals. He is in St. Petersburg for a two-day workshop on integrating marine life into a state strategy for protecting wildlife.

He arrived a day early to look for birds.

He is looking for shore birds. If he is extremely lucky, he will see an elegant tern, he says. The bird's range is from Mexico to California. To find one in Florida would be unusual.

He is looking for warblers. About 55 species blanket the United States. From 3 to 8 inches in length, they hide in ground cover and thickets. Their appearance and color varies by species, gender, age and breeding season. They trill or chip or buzz like an insect.

He will hear a warbler before he sees it.

The 42-year-old Torres (his friends call him Toe) has been birding six years, since a cold January morning at Everglades National Park, where the mosquitoes were so thick "you had to throw a rock through (them) to see a bird."

His interest springs from a lifelong curiosity about nature. As a child on his father's commercial fishing boat, he watched birds loop overhead. Like his father, he intended to fish for a living.

His father said to go to school: The days of straining nets and loaded longlines are gone.

Torres fishes for birds. He keeps day lists and year lists and lifetime lists of the birds he sees and the ones he must find.

"It's pretty much the same philosophy," he says. "It's there. All you've got to do is stop and look."

Today Torres is working on his year list. He wants to see 300 species in a single year in Florida. He is at 211. He wants a 20-warbler day. "Somehow you measure the quality of the day by how many warblers you see. You say, "Only a 10-warbler day.' Fifteen is good; 25 is a blowout."

He points his rental car out of the Circle K parking lot and heads south on Pinellas Bayway, stopping at a spit of sand near a bridge and hopping out. A woman walking a black Lab in the fuzzy gray light curiously eyes the man in white T-shirt and cargo shorts, binoculars to his face.

He spies his first year-list bird of the day, a semipalmated sandpiper.

His wife, he says, calls this obsession. He calls it fun.

A natural learning curve

Torres has worked for the Nature Conservancy since 2001. Before then, he was on the staff of the Governor's Commission for a Sustainable South Florida, created to draw a blueprint for restoring the Everglades. Torres learned about invasive species and water flow - and that half the Everglades is already gone.

The former commercial fisherman says he is not a "tree-hugger." He has always been a conservationist.

"I never saw myself as the destructive arm of the fishing fleet. I saw myself as a responsible member of the food chain," Torres says. When numbers of a species plummeted, he believed in leaving that fish alone for a while. Other fishermen would scramble to catch what was left.

Torres' father, Roberto, and his uncle, Raimundo, fished in Cuba. Their family had always fished. Then "things got really horrible in the mid '60s. Cuba was very Soviet." His uncle moved to the United States. To punish the family for Raimundo's defection, the government took Roberto's fishing boat. "They would tell him, "This week you're not going to fish. You're going to go cut (sugar) cane,' " Torres says.

Torres' father got another boat but the government assigned him a Communist Party member as fishing partner. The family devised an escape plan.

When the guards patrolling the beach were at the farthest end, the 5-year-old Torres, his brother, his mother, grandmother and two other men sneaked to a designated spot and his father swooped in with the boat.

"I almost drowned," says Torres, who slipped under the waves as they boarded.

They left many relatives behind. They took the Communist with them so he could not tell.

In Florida, when he was a teenager, Torres worked summers and weekends on his father's boat, catching mackerel and swordfish and sharks beyond the Keys or in the waters off Broward and Miami-Dade counties. The seas were so full they'd find 55 lobsters in a single trap.

"I got to do it with my dad," says Torres. "What kid wouldn't want that?"

He enrolled in college in 1988 and earned a master's degree in marine affairs in 1997, paying expenses by spending a night hauling in yellow-tail snapper and other boutique fish for chic restaurants.

His father is 80, his uncle 82. "The last fish I caught was a swordfish," says Torres, "and I released it."

He is standing alone on the sand, the Sunshine Skyway in the distance, the beach covered with dozens of gulls. A formation of brown pelicans skims the water against an overcast sky. Torres spots schools of Glass minnows forming dark shadows in the bay. When he was a fisherman, he'd throw his net in and catch millions for bait.

This morning he is looking for a single common tern.

It is not common.

"There it is. No. That's a Forster's," he says, using binoculars to scope out the crowd. A Common has a few dark feathers a Forster's lacks.

"That's the bad thing about abundance. You have to look through every single bird."

I saw it on mulberry tree

At the Bay Pier, near a growling excavator digging a pit, and a bus unloading teenagers on a field trip, there is a hotel whose patrons are as rowdy as their surroundings.

A 25-foot mulberry tree with cascading branches and blackberrylike fruit is the Daytona Beach of spring breaks for birds.

"This is easy. Almost too easy," says Torres. He once trekked 2 miles through rocky mountains in Arizona to find a single olive warbler, which lives at high elevations in the tips of 100-foot conifers.

The mulberry is crowded with species.

There's a grosbeak, says a man in a polo shirt.

"Rose-breasted?" asks Torres.

The bird is black and white, with a red breast and lining on its wings, a tuxedo embellished with snazzy scarf.

Steve Hobby of St. Petersburg, who spotted the Grosbeak, stopped at the tree on his way to work as a sales rep for Medtronic, a medical supply company.

Bird-watching is a lifelong interest, he says.

"I'm trying to see that scarlet tanager."

Torres is circling the tree, quiet, his face upturned, his eyes darting back and forth.

"You're seeing migration," he pronounces.

"It's a rest stop on the turnpike. They're filling up."

He waits for birds to dart in and out. He spots a cinnamon-colored orchard oriole. "I've got four year(-list) birds just in this tree," Torres says.

Two workmen stop to find out why a half-dozen people are ogling a tree.

Even as he converses, Torres' head is slightly cocked to listen for calls.

As needed, he pulls a paperback from one of the seven pockets of his cargo shorts titled Field Guide to the Birds of North America, 443 dog-eared pages of illustrations and maps.

"I'm driving home from work and I'm looking," he says, demonstrating by bobbing and weaving his head, his face skyward. "I'm driving through urban Miami and I see hawks overhead, dueling it out."

Got warblers?

In search of warblers on a path through the flatwoods at East Beach, Torres asks the same question of every birder he meets.

"What have you seen?"

"When you find one of the different ones, it's so much more than bird-watching," he says.

The weather is uncooperative: cloudy, and with no weather fronts to drop birds to shelter. But Torres says there are warblers here. "I can hear them. I can feel them."

Abruptly, he runs around a stand of palm trees and slaps the binoculars to his eyes.

He sees a black and white warbler and a worm-eating Warbler.

He thinks he sees a Louisiana waterthrush warbler, but it may have been a Northern. It does not count.

"We're on eight," he says of the warbler tally.

He is making a mental list.

"You can tell the really geeky birders," he says, demonstrating a person writing on a piece of paper with pen. Others are amateurishly impatient. "The difference between people who get a lot of birds and people who don't are the people who get a lot of birds know when to stop."

Lloyd (you can call me Pappy) Snyder of Jonesboro, Ga., is a construction sales rep who visits Fort De Soto every spring.

"Now if you go all the way to the end," he tells Torres in a thick drawl, pointing east, "there should be a group looking at a Swainson's (warbler)."

Torres is excited.

"You get just as much adrenaline as a guy going out to shoot something," he says.

He scans the brush-covered ground between the palms and oaks. He hears a distinctive chuk, chuk. "I think it's a Kentucky warbler."

He waits, jogs down the path a bit, scans the trees, jogs back. He has it. The bird likely flew from Central America or even Venezuela.

"He's the best bird of the day. He's my life bird," Torres says. As he hikes out of the hammock, he adds, "I should have done my little happy dance."

One warbler for the road

Torres is six hours into his day. He heads to the Arrowhead camping area in search of a blue-winged Warbler. He is still crowing over the Kentucky. He calls a friend who, when he's not birding, monitors water quality in the Everglades.

"Hey. Kentucky Warbler, buddy!"

"Ken-tuck-y!"

He thinks he caught a glimpse of a blue-wing, which is actually yellow in color.

"I'm not kidding."

"Ooooh. Ohhhh."

"I don't want to run out there because then I will spook it," he says, soundlessly circling a patch of palms and brush by the restrooms.

He makes a noise to call the bird out. Pish. Pish. Pish. It is a baited line, minus a hook.

Today Torres has traipsed live oak hammocks to parking lot green spaces to interstate causeways to soupy lagoons to white sand beaches, fishing for birds.

He will let the blue-wing go.

He has added 14 birds to his year list.

It is a 15-warbler day.

- Susan Aschoff can be reached at 727 892-2293 or aschoff@sptimes.com