TRYING TO FOCUS ON THE RIGHT THINGS

how many bad photos you have to take before you get a good one. I have so much respect for the people who captured good wildlife images on film, especially when every frame you shot had a price tag.

When Mark Whiteside called the other morning, my phone was across the room and I missed it. But then he sent a text, which I caught soon after. He’d seen a smooth-billed ani at Indigenous Park. So I grabbed my binoculars and my camera and headed down there.

He’d left by the time I got there, gone off to find warblers at Fort Zach and the Botanical Garden, so I spent a good bit of time wandering the park alone, not seeing the ani.

Anis are weird and distinctive birds, with a big, arced bill that looks like a parody of a Greco-Roman nose in profile. If you didn’t see its head, you could be forgiven for confusing one with a grackle, except anis have an iridescent scalloping pattern on the ends of their coverts and neck feathers, which make them look like fancy goth kids late at night at the club.

They are very common in the Caribbean and South and Central America. They were never common in South Florida, but there used to be several reliable communities of them. They were easy to find, partly because they’re a gregarious species and partly because they’re communal birds – so communal that multiple females usually lay their eggs in the same nest and raise them together. (It sounds kind of idealistic, until you learn that the latter nesting females will often push the eggs of earlier nesting females out of the nest, or sometimes just build another layer of nest over them, before laying their own.)

For some reason their Florida population crashed in the early 2000s, all but disappearing. Individual birds get seen on occasion, but with no regularity and in no reliable spot. There was one at Fort Zach this winter, but it disappeared before I got a look, and it’s probably been five or eight years since I’ve actually laid eyes on one.

Whiteside said the bird at Indigenous looked somewhat rough, making him think it had possibly just flown in from Cuba.

I’d texted Kevin Christman earlier, and when I was thinking about heading home, saw him walk into the park, then disappear. I tracked him down near the aviary.

“It’s right there,” he said. I took a step around him and flushed the bird.

This ani bucked his species tendencies and ended up being pretty lurking and shy. We spent the next 20 minutes tracking it through the bushes, catching sight of it here and there, only to have it slip away again. I got decent-ifbrief looks at it, and back before I had a camera, that would have been fine. But now I was all acquisitional and demanding. Every time I’d raise the camera it would focus on a branch or a leaf, or the bird’s head would be out of frame. Or the light would be bad. Or I’d manage to have the autofocus hit, but it would be the back of the bird’s head. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

Finally, I found a clear line through a tumble of branches and caught a few frames of its head from a weird angle that kind of worked for me, with a glint in the bird’s eye and a lot of detail in the face. And a few minutes later a full profile shot of the bird. Which filled me with something like a sense of relief – I hadn’t failed at this whole birdwatching photography thing.

I’ve been thinking over the last few days, though, that relief probably isn’t the right thing to feel when I see a rare and weird bird like that – or any bird, really. And that maybe I need to come up with a less spiritually impoverished attitude. Even if I’m not about to give up my camera.

By: Tracy and Sean McDonald

The Scoreboard

Xavyer Arrington

This Week In Keys Sports

Senior, Coral Shores

Weightlifting, Track & Field

Coral Shores strongman Xavyer Arrington was not finished when he brought home his second gold medal in weightlifting last month. The Naval Academy-bound athlete is committed to play football next fall, but between his state championship in weightlifting and collegiate football career, Arrington will now compete for yet another set of state medals, this time in track and field.

Arrington recently took first place in the FHSAA 2A Region 4 championship in discus and sixth in shot put. The first-place finish in discus guaranteed him a spot at the state championship in Jacksonville on May 18. He is ranked sixth in the discus, but still has his sights set on two medals, having also earned an at-large bid in the shot put event with a 12th-place overall ranking ahead of the state meet.

Arrington has set school records in both events and has set the bar high for future Hurricane athletes. For his outstanding accomplishments in athletics and setting a stellar example for his teammates, Xavyer Arrington is the Keys Weekly Athlete of the Week.

By: Tracy and Sean McDonald