The Caloosa Bird Club invites its members, and visitors interested in birding, to join in the fun that we have on our adventures! If you are a novice birder, there are no worries. Our membership includes birders at all levels of experience. Prospective members must attend at least one monthly meeting and two field trips before becoming members. Our dues are $20.00 annually and there is a $15.00 initiation fee that gets you a cool nametag.
Our schedule, posted on this website, includes the dates, times, locations (and links with directions) to our weekly Monday birding trips at various locations and our monthly meetings. The latter are all held on Sunday afternoons at the Wa-Ke Hatchee Recreation Center (16760 Bass Rd, Fort Myers). We have speakers on birding topics at our monthly meetings, discuss and share photos of the birds that we've seen on recent club trips, and share information of interesting sightings in our area.
This season, we have "local" birding trips scheduled for every Monday from November 9 to April 19. All of them meet on location at 8:00 a.m. Some are very local in Fort Myers. Others require more travel, such as south to the Naples area or, at the extreme, north to Fort De Soto Park, some 130 miles from Fort Myers. We have sign-up sheets at our monthly meetings and at our trip sites. A few trips have size limits. Often, if the trip is in Fort Myers, we will finish by noon, and usually each bring a sack lunch and eat together. There's socializing at our lunches, and we work together to make our club bird list for the day (to be on the club list, at least two persons must see the bird). Of course, all participants should bring adequate water, wear good walking shoes, and dress appropriately as needed for the sun or inclement weather. There are three overnight (two nights – Sun., Mon.) trips to St. Marks NWR in the Florida panhandle, Everglades National Park, and Merritt Island. These are addressed at our monthly meetings, not in these overviews.
If you are new to the Fort Myers area and wish to visit our local parks frequently, where parking is $1/hr or $5/day, you might consider purchasing a Lee County Parks and Recreation annual parking pass ($60 - https://www.leegov.com/parks/resources/parking ). The process is not intuitive, so follow these steps: (1) take the link above and click on "Purchase a Parking Pass Online," (2) in the "Choose Your City" window, scroll down to select "Lee County Parks," (3) scroll down the next page to the bold heading "Local or frequent visitor?" and click on "Buy LCPR Annual Pass Subscription Now," (4) click on the "red bar with VIEW RATE in white text," (5) click on the "red bar with PARK HERE in white text," and finally (6) this takes you to the checkout page, where it looks like you're paying only to park at the Alva Boat Ramp, which is the first site alphabetically (you're getting all the Lee County Parks except Lynn Hall/Bonita Beach Park). The checkout process is, thankfully, more intuitive.
Note that most beach parking on Sanibel Island is for their City Parks, which are not included in the Lee County Parking Pass. Bowman's Beach Park on Sanibel, the Causeway Islands beaches, as well as Turner Beach on Captiva Island, are Lee County Parks included in the privileges of the Lee County Parks and Recreation annual parking pass.