peveto woods birds & butterfly sanctuary

We have driven this route several times and had no idea this place existed. Even with following the directions on the BRAS page, we still missed it and had to turn around. The sign is parallel to the road and against the fence. It is easy to find if you turn on the road to Florida Beach. We heard lots of songs and saw movement but didn't get close ups of anything except the water birds. Nonetheless it is a lovely bird sanctuary and well worth spending time there. We'll stop on our next time through the area.

Katrina may have taken out the Visitor's Center but it left the trees, trails and coast. It's a great place for birding with lots of songbirds in the woods and shorebirds along the beach. There are often herons found in the little pond.

Even though we had north winds on one of the two days’ afternoons we birded there, we did not experience the hoped-for spectacular migrant “fallout.” However, we did get great views (and photos in some cases) of species fairly close to the ground. A summer tanager posed obligingly on a rope barrier and allowed close approach. A male scarlet tanager was also close enough to yield good photos with my compact Canon Superzoom digital camera. Other species we saw included male and female redstarts, a black and white warbler, hooded warbler, loggerhead shrike, white eyed and warbling vireos, ruddy turnstones, willets, and avocets. For land birds, the best birding seemed in the area close to the parking lot. We did not hear a lot of bird song. We were told that there had been fire damage some time ago in the woods and that birding there hadn’t been as good since then. Perhaps so; fire damage was not obvious to us. Nevertheless, for two intermediate level, rather laid-back birders, Peveto Woods was still enjoyable, with interesting habitat. If we were in the area again we would certainly revisit it