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.
