Roamed the beach parks in Boca Raton (1 Viewer)

This weekend, I was set to go to Green Cay and Wakodahatchee as usual - I started off in Green Cay, and got some decent shots, but the day wa cloudy and threatening rain, plus hot and humid, so I only spent a few hours there and was going to head to Wakodahatchee. Unfortunately, it's currently closed for its occasional maintenance/repair week, until Oct 31...so I needed to come up with a secondary plan. I figured I really haven't tried birding along the beach parks, and if it failed miserably, I could always shoot the huge golden orb weaver spiders and blue crabs, and maybe the occasional raccoon. So I first headed down to John Rutherford park on the intercoastal, where I know the spiders are in heavy population. Surprisingly, not only did I get some cool spider shots, and some fun sessions with some bold raccoons, I also got some good encounters with vultures, a few cardinals, little blue heron, and my first spotting of a yellow-crowned night heron (I always seem to see the black-crowneds). Not a bad walkthrough at all.

Emboldened, I decided to work my way over to Spanish River park, where I spotted some monk parakeets (but not good shot opportunities as they were way in the trees in bad light), and out on the beach had some fun watching the sandpipers in the wake, osprey and frigatebirds overhead, a few brown pelican squadrons, laughing gulls, and even spotted a shark in the rough surf - fin above surface for about 40 feet, and could see his body in the crested wave. I then went to Gumbo Limbo, and had a lovely closeup shot of an as-yet unidentified bird, likely some type of warbler, but I couldn't ID him as a palm, yellow, or yellow rumped...I'm not good with warblers so I'll need some ID help here when I can post it. And I also spotted and photographed another unknown bird - some kind of smallish owl, who sat on a branch and kept his head tucked, making him hard for me to ID. I took photos and will have to crop them tight to see if any of the experts here can ID him. Along with some fun walking through the Gumbo Limbo tanks, with the lobsters and sharks and turtles, it was a good excursion and something different than the usual birding!

Sounds like fun! I don't go to the beach hardly enough. Somehow it seems so difficult here, with traffic, crappy parking and the hotels/condos taking 99.9% of the beachfront.

Update - I finally posted those two mystery birds I couldn't ID - the odd looking owl thing and the small warbler-like thing. Ends up I spotted 3 first-time birds in the same trip to the beach - what a day! The strange-looking owl-like bird wasn't an owl at all - according to the good folks on the bird identification forum, they ID'd as a nightjar, more specifically the chuck-will's widow, which I've always heard as a name thrown around here, but never seen one, until Saturday. Here are the two shots I got of him:

http://www.pbase.com/zackiedawg/image/129795569/original.jpg

http://www.pbase.com/zackiedawg/image/129795568/original.jpg

And the other bird, which I thought somewhat resembled a warbler but I couldn't match it to any known warblers? Turns out that was a white-eyed vireo:

http://www.pbase.com/zackiedawg/image/129795566/original.jpg

And it got pretty close, as you can see...didn't even need to crop that one.

So with the yellow crowned night heron, I landed three first-time birds, and all because Wakodahatchee was closed and I decided to head down to the beach parks instead.

Congrats! I can't believe how good a shot you got of the Chuck Will's Widow - they're so hard to spot

Thank you. Indeed - I didn't really know what a score I got until it was identified here...I was thinking all along I was just photographing some sleeping owl.