The original island name was “Massacre Island” because in 1600s a French explorer found the island with piles of Native American skeletal remains. It turns out the remains were due to a hurricane breaking open a burial mound. Later, the island was renamed to Isle Dauphine to honor Dauphine of France who was the heir apparent of France.

If it was not for being renamed in the 1700s, you would think they did it to avoid scaring away tourists.

The island has around 1700 residents and a lot of rental properties. Most of the rental properties were on stilts. This is not a place to stay if you do not like climbing stairs.

The island is home to Fort Gaines. We did not explore the fort but did drive by it.

You can take a ferry from the Fort Gaines area to Fort Morgan which is across the bay for $25 per car plus $6 per person. We plan to visit Fort Morgan later in our stay.

Close to where the ferry leaves are multiple piers, picnic areas, and walking paths. Fort Gaines is across the street from them, and the east public beach is on the other side of Fort Gaines. We saw more birds in this area than in the bird sanctuary. Even better, the birds were closer to us.

As we left Fort Gaines, we pulled over because we saw a Snowy Egret hunting on the barrier rocks. It looks like it might be in a little too deep.

We took some good closeups, so there is a better picture for the bird catalog.

Just to the left of barrier rocks with the egret is a fishing pier; it was amazing how close the blue heron was to the fisherman. The heron stayed next to him for a long time, until another fisherman wanted the heron’s spot.

You can see how windy it was from the crest feathers flapping in the wind.

The area has offshore oil drilling. Some of the drilling companies have provided grants to Mobile County to upgrade the parks. The park we are staying at benefited from one of the grants.

We parked next to the sign above. You can see it on Google street view here. Past the fishing pier are some small picnic pavilions with bird feeders being visited by House Sparrows.

In the water in front of the pavilions are barrier rocks with pelicans, seagulls, and egrets. We thought we were going to miss out on the Brown Pelican because it jumped into the water to feed.

Fortunately, he came back to watch the breaking waves and to verify that he remembered to put on deodorant this morning.

The walkway closer to the where the ferry leaves had a view of the barrier rocks with hundreds of birds along the rocks. These were mostly Laughing Gulls on the nearest rocks and Double Crested Cormorants on the farthest rocks. There were also a few Brown Pelicans, a Snowy Egret, and an unknown juvenile seagull. In one picture, you can see the causeway in the background.

Here is a picture of John being too lazy to extend the legs of the tripod to photograph the cormorants.

Just to the left of the picture above is a boat ramp. Most of the pylons had Laughing Gulls standing or sitting on them.

Next, we went to the other side of the island to the west public beach. John tried to take a picture of a bird at the west public beach parking lot. Unfortunately, some girls decided it would be fun to walk through the the flock of birds, so John did not get a picture. The gulls were not scared at all. Only the birds John wanted to photograph flew away.

Finally, Kate needed post cards and saw a photo stand-in at the same place.

You would not look happy either, if tens of thousands of your people were caught in tuna nets each year! The store had some amusing signs up on the wall. For this one, we are not going to list any of the people that this reminds us of…

I wonder how many of their employees get washed out to sea during hurricanes?

This one backfired. A lady left her kid unattended in hopes of getting a puppy.

A lot of pet owners need one of these dish towels.

We thought we were done for the day, so we headed out. On the drive home from Dauphin Island, we saw Brown Pelicans on pylons, on the mainland side of the causeway. We were finally able to get good closeup pictures of the pelicans.

We headed out again. A mile further up the road we saw some tiny wading birds, so we stopped again.

We did not realize it a the time, but this was a Willet and Greater Yellow Legs. In total, it was three new birds and good pictures of two more birds we had already seen. This was the last stop before we got home, but only because we did not see any more birds.