Navarre Beach

Posted on April 25, 2026 by Roger

We didn’t research this trip much, planning on making it up as we went along. But we made reservations for our hotel for Saturday and Sunday nights based on a recommendation by family members who had stayed there. It was the Springhill Suites, located about half a mile west of the causeway on Santa Rosa Island. The island is about 40-miles long and contains (west to east) Fort Pickens (one of the few southern forts to remain in Union hands for the entire Civil War), Pensacola Beach, the Santa Rosa section of Gulf Islands National Seashore, Navarre Beach, and Okaloosa Island.

Our room was on the second level facing the gulf, with the swimming pool just below. Here’s our view. On the first evening, there was a wedding on the beach. Preparations for it can be seen just beyond the end of the walkway over the dunes.

We spent much of the time on the balcony looking at the Gulf and trying not to look at all the people in the pool who shouldn’t have been out in public in swimwear.

The suite had three rooms — the bedroom on the ocean side, a bathroom, and a room with a couch on the hallway side. I thought the couch should have been in the front room with the ocean view. It was very nice, although the bed was too hard. It should be nice — it cost something over $300/night.

I figured there would be a steady parade of birds moving up and down the shore, but it was not nearly as active as I expected. I did see Brown Pelicans, Royal Terns, Black Skimmers, Laughing Gulls, a Common Loon, Sanderlings and the usual suspects like starlings, House Sparrows, grackles, mockingbirds, and Mourning Doves. On Sunday afternoon, I spotted a pod of bottlenose dolphins way out in the Gulf.

Because we were on the end, our balcony had a side view from which we could see northwest to Santa Rosa Sound.

On both Sunday and Monday mornings, I got up early and went birding on the nearby beaches. Again, I was expecting action similar to what I’d found on the Atlantic in Georgia and Florida last spring, but there weren’t very many birds around. I think it’s because the Navarre Beach area had a limited variety of habitats — it was beach and dunes, with a few small ponds but very little salt marsh, no trees, and no swamps.

Here’s early morning on the Sound side of the island.

And the beach side, about 300 yards off to the right of the above photo.

I walked east on the beach as far as I could go. There was a barrier to keep people away from some sort of military monitoring station. I picked up a few shells that my wife wanted, although the beach was picked over. I found a blue plastic jewel that I showed to another shell-seeker. We pretended it was from a pirate’s treasure. I also found an unexceptional gray shell that I gave to a young woman who thought it was amazing and was very grateful. My best find was a tiny, almost perfect sand dollar that I brought back for my wife.

My favorite site on the beach was a Great Blue Heron who looked for all the world like he was monitoring one of the many fishing poles.

I saw Royal, Sandwich, and Least Terns, Black Skimmers, Laughing Gulls, Brown Pelicans, Great Blue Herons, Sanderlings, Willets, Ruddy Turnstones, Wilson’s Plovers, and a Black-belled Plover, all cool birds but nothing rare or exotic. I also heard and got very brief glimpses of a Clapper Rail and a Marsh Wren. And I saw the usual suspects. My great hope was a Gull-billed Tern, which would have been a lifer, but never, here or anywhere else on the trip, did I see one.

On Sunday afternoon, we walked out onto Navarre Beach fishing pier. There was a guy at the base of the pier taking $1.00 from everyone except us. I didn’t realize until later what he was doing. I’m not sure why he didn’t stop us — it may have been that we were wearing our key card bracelets from the hotel which gave us a pass. There must have been over 100 fishermen on the pier. Out by the end, we saw a guy reel in a fish about 12″ long. Then, as we were walking back toward the shore, there was a great flurry of excitement as one guy hooked a larger fish.

I asked and was told it was a Cobia. When we were at the end of the pier, I spotted a Loggerhead Turtle, but before I could get a photo, it had started to dive.

Here’s a look back at our hotel from the pier.

The first evening, we ate at Andy D’s Beachside Restaurant, just down from our hotel. It wasn’t fancy and the food wasn’t spectacular, but it was decent. The second evening, because we ate so much food at Flounder’s in Pensacola Beach at lunch, we just snacked on some stuff we bought at the grocery store.

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USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park

Posted on April 25, 2026 by Roger

We took a short (six-day) vacation to the Gulf Coast. On Friday, we drove down to Vicksburg, stopping in McGehee, Arkansas for a BBQ lunch at Hoots and along the shore of Grand Lake to see White-winged Doves. We drove through a corner of Louisiana because my wife had never been to that state. We took a quick trip through Vicksburg National Military Park, only getting out of the car to tour the USS Cairo Civil War Ironclad and the museum of items recovered from her. We spent the night at a Hampton Inn south of Jackson.

On Saturday, we drove down to Mobile and toured the USS Alabama battleship. It took us about two hours and we saw everything there was to see except the engine room. I took about 50 photos, but I’m not including them all in this post. The most interesting part of the tour for me was the separate full range of facilities — food, laundry, supplies, beds, etc. — for officers, warrant officers, NCOs, and sailors. We went three or four levels up in the superstructure, and two levels down below the main deck.

Some random photos from inside the ship.

Captain’s cabin when the ship was at sea. (There was another larger cabin below that he used in port.)

Crew galley

Crew quarters

The “Gedunk,” an ice cream parlor found only on larger ships — battleships and carriers.

Hospital isolation ward

Radio Room

After eating lunch in the diner in the park (some surprisingly good hot dogs), we toured the USS Drum, a WWII submarine that saw a lot of action.

Captain’s cabin

Officers’ wardroom

Torpedo tubes

Crew bunks were sandwiched in wherever there was room.

We took our time and saw both ships thoroughly. It was interesting, but tiring. We had another hour-and-a-half drive down to Navarre Beach, where we had reserved our hotel.

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Bird #610 — Northern Fulmar

Posted on January 25, 2026 by Roger

fulmarus glacialis

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Pacific Ocean off San Diego, California

For some reason I don’t recall, I recently decided to look back at my photos from the whale-seeking trip I took out into the Pacific Ocean off San Diego when I was out there for work several years ago..

I knew I’d taken photos of some other birds I’d seen from the boat, but since there was no naturalist and no other birders on the trip to consult with, I’d declined to identify them. But looking carefully at them now, I’m convinced that at least one of those other birds is identifiable as a Norther Fulmar.

It’s stocky, with all dark gray/brown plumage and a large bill that looks pale-colored. I can see a dark smudge around the eye, another Fulmar field mark. I only remember that it was quite a ways from the boat, traveling north in a straight line low over the water.

He’s my original photo.

And here’s a cropped and lightened version.

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Bird #609 — Western Warbling Vireo

Posted on October 29, 2025 by Roger

vireo swainsoni

Viento State Park, Oregon

Tuesday, May 6, 2008 — 4:50 pm

The Warbling Vireo has just been officially split into Eastern and Western species, netting me another lifer. According to my eBird records, I saw my first Western one in 2008 on a work trip to Portland. My sister and I went out a couple days early to sightsee. On the first day, we drove along the Columbia River, stopping at three or four places to look around and bird. I remember the Viento State Park— just a thin strip of vegetation between the highway and the river, but I don’t remember this particular bird because it was just a Warbling Vireo at the time, and I’d seen plenty of them in Illinois.

I do have a distinct memory of two Western Warbling Vireos I saw in Eleven Mile Canyon in Colorado on June 20, 2020. My wife and I had visited the canyon a short time earlier, and when I looked at the park list, I realized I was just a few birds away from having the largest list. I went back and spent a good chunk of a day looking for birds, and by the end of the day, I had the largest list (since surpassed—as of October, 2025, I’m in second place, five behind the leader). Anyway, maybe because the Western Warbling Vireo’s song is somewhat different than the Eastern song I’m more familiar with, I decided to find the actual bird and make sure it was a Warbling Vireo. It took me a long time. I circled around a small clump of Aspen, trying to triangulate and find the bird. I finally spotted it—actually sitting in its nest and singing. I didn’t know birds did that. Later in the day, about five miles away, I heard a second one. This time, with a better idea of what to look for, I found it much faster. It was also singing on its nest. I got photos of both birds.

When the new species was added to eBird, my records were automatically split. I’ve seen Western Warbling Vireos 43 times, most of them in Colorado while I lived there, but also a few in Arizona on my 2022 trip and one in Grant Teton National Park in 2024.

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Illinois and Indiana

Posted on October 24, 2025 by Roger

The day began oddly. As I was checking out at the Hampton Inn, the clerk saw where I was from and said, “Wow, you’re a long way from home. Did you drive?” I said “yes.” I thought it was an odd question. For starters, we were only eight hours away from home, which isn’t that far, and I’m not sure how else we could have gotten there. My “yes” was said in a voice that meant “I’m not sure why this surprises you since you work in a hotel and see people from out of state all the time. Can you expand on your question.” The clerk must have thought my “yes” meant, “You are a world-class moron.” He gave me a curt “Fine, then,” and wouldn’t speak to me again. It was Macomb, after all. Perhaps he confused Arkansas with Alaska or Albania or something. After a quick breakfast at the hotel, we took off.

We had four goals today.

  1. Get from Macomb, Illinois to Ogden Dunes, Indiana.
  2. Travel through Mercer and Stark Counties, the two counties in Illinois I’d never been in.
  3. Avoid all Illinois toll roads. Some backstory here: In 2023, we traveled up to Wisconsin and returned through Illinois, visiting some of our old haunts and old friends in Chicagoland. Along the way, we drove on toll roads. You can no longer pay on the road but have to go online when you get home to pay the tolls. The Illinois government site says that it can take as long as two weeks for your tolls to appear on the site. We checked several times and never found them. We even took a screen shot of the page to show that they weren’t there. Then we got a bill in the mail for our tolls and a hefty fine for not paying them within two weeks. We sent the screen shot in to prove that we couldn’t pay them and were told that wasn’t sufficient evidence and we had to pay the fine. There may have been a 12 minute window after the tolls showed up on the site and before we were fined, I don’t know. The entire thing a perfect example of the rampant corruption and incompetence that battle for preeminence in the state. We vowed that we would never give the Illinois Tollway another penny of our money.
  4. Avoid the stretch of I-80-94 across Northern Indiana where the road is 12 lanes wide and packed with trucks, many of which are pulling two or even three trailors.

All of that means that we would be taking a lot of backroads. At first this was fine—Mercer and Stark counties are out of the way, which is why I’d never been in either before, but we checked them off early in the morning. The entire rest of the drive consisted of going east for a few miles, then north for a few miles, then east for a few miles, then north for a few miles, with a few southward jogs now and again. We were on roads so obscure that we didn’t find a place to eat lunch until we got to Crown Point, Indiana at around 2:30.

Our hotel was called Al & Sally’s Hotel in Town of Pines, about 20 minutes east of my nieces house. We had to make that 20-minute drive several times over the next two-and-a-half days, but most of it was through pretty Fall woods, so we didn’t mind.

The hotel looked cute on the outside and advertised itself as vintage. We soon discerned that “vintage” was code for “we don’t feel like upgrading but we don’t mind charging a lot.”

Not to complain, but …

  1. The curtains were thin and let in a great deal of light. They were also not wide enough to cover the window so we had to find various ways to stretch them and hold them in place.
  2. There were no chairs in the room except four very small, uncomfortable wooden ones around the tiny table.
  3. The bathroom was in serious need of upgrading, especially in the tub. Various ceramic and plastic parts of no-longer-existing towel racks and soap dispensers jutted out so that we were constantly bumping them. Also, the tile hadn’t been grouted in a long time and the room smelled very musty.
  4. There was no way to adjust the volume on the TV, which was loud.
  5. Only half the lights in the room worked, and there was no overhead light.
  6. The mattresses were hard and lumpy from who-knows-how-many previous renters, and we both had very sore backs after our three nights there.

On Friday evening, we drove to my niece’s house in Odgen Dunes and hung with family, which was very enjoyable.

On Saturday morning, I abandoned my wife to a morning with no place to sit and went birding. I had a good time, although October birding in Northern Indiana is a lot like winter birding in Arkansas. I was hoping to see Mute Swans, Black-capped Chickadees, and American Black Ducks. I never saw the Mute Swans this trip. I did see a pair of Trumpeter Swans and a small flock (17 I think) of Sandhill Cranes (which are rare in Arkansas).

By mid-morning, I was feeling guilty about my wife, so I went back to the hotel and suggested an adventure. We drove around on backroads looking at foliage for awhile, then drove along Lake Michigan. We stopped at a gift shop and ate lunch at Joe’s Bread, where my great-niece and great-nephew both work. They weren’t there that day, but the food was good.

We were back at the hotel with a couple hours to kill, so I walked across the railroad tracks behind the building to a bike trail in Indiana Dunes National Park.

The wedding was at a small, pretty church in Odgen Dunes at 3:00. We saw some shirttail relatives we hadn’t seen since moving from Illinois nine years ago. The reception was at a yacht club nearby. We sat with family and had a good time.

On Sunday, we hung with our niece and her husband, our nephew and his wife, and various assortments of great-nieces and great-nephews who came and went. We hung around the house for a while, then drove to Town of Pines to Joe & Freddy’s for lunch. We walked a marsh trail, then along the Beverly Shores beach, then went back to the house to eat Pizzaria Uno and watch the Packers/Steelers game. The family hadn’t been all together like this since my sister died in 2020, so it was nice to see everyone.

We left our hotel at 7:30 on Monday and drove all the way home, again avoiding I-80-94 and Illinois toll roads. We ate lunch at Culver’s in Effingham, Illinois. In keeping with a tradition we started years and years ago, my wife did the driving through Missouri while I handled Illinois and Arkansas. We got home at 7:40 p.m. and a few days later came down with a virus that seems like some variety of COVID, but it was a successful vacation, and we loved spending time with my family.

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