Southwest Florida bird photography (page 3)
Beach at the lighthouse at the eastern end of Sanibel Island

We hit this area on two separate days in the early afternoon after lunch (prioritizing the morning light for Ding Darling). To get here make a left on Periwinkle way shortly after getting on the island from Sanibel causeway blvd.  Follow Perinwinkle all the way to the end.  Parking is $2 per hour and can be crowded and difficult to find a parking spot on weekends.  If you are looking for place for an affordable lunch and chill out in the middle of the day, then Rosie's market and deli about 1/4 mile from the end is a good place for sandwiches. 

You will find this end of the island is popular with brown pelicans that dive for fish off these waters between the pier and beach out toward the southeast point. Also, up in the air you will find osprey are common here.  Look for some nests on some man-made platforms just inland from the fishing pier.  Overhead and on the beach, you can see laughing and ring necked gulls along with royal terns. On the beach you can find willets, ruddy turnstones, sanderlings, black-bellied and semi-palmated plovers.  There are also some cordoned off areas for snowy plovers, but I did not see any sign of them.  In the water on one day where the amount of diving pelicans was heavy, we also noted a number of dolphins offshore potentially pursuing the same schools of fish.

On a second day visit to this location, the birding was much less productive.  It would seem that some of this may be related to the number of fish about, to attract in some of the birds such as the pelicans and osprey.  Only a few gulls and a few plovers were to be found.  We also noticed on this slow bird day that there were no dolphins about either, further substantiating the fish theory and its correlation to good birding.