Strangler figs, live oaks and gumbo limbos shade the graves of Confederate soldiers and Florida pioneers. At Fort Lauderdale’s Evergreen Cemetery, a few fragments of history linger in a city overrun by strip malls.

The old graveyard also provides a haven for a vast variety of warblers, tanagers and other birds trying to navigate ancient migration routes through urbanized South Florida. On weekend mornings, bird watchers wander among the headstones, trying to spot a western spindalis or Bahama mockingbird. Sightings of rare species lead to Internet postings that draw birders from as far as California.

“It is really, really, really a hot spot,” said Ann Wiley, of Fort Lauderdale, as she walked toward the north end with her binoculars. “It’s known to have a lot of warblers. You always have Baltimore orioles come through here. You can see a great variety in a short period of time during migrations.”

The cemetery is as gothic a place as can be found in Fort Lauderdale. Even on sunny days, it’s full of dark shadows, as the tall old trees shade the paths and graves. A row of tombs lines the high ground along the thickets at the eastern edge, where the land descends sharply to a narrow pond of black water.

Near one of the northern gates stands a headstone with the single word Stranahan, marking the graves of the pioneer couple who ran a trading post on Fort Lauderdale’s New River. In 1929, depressed by financial failures, Frank Stranahan tied an iron grate to his foot and jumped into the river. His widow Ivy lived until 1971, long enough to see a downtown grow up around their house.

The cemetery, located east of Federal Highway and south of Davie Boulevard, attracts people with a taste for things eerie. Ghost hunters, such as the Palm Beach Paranormal Society, have visited with digital cameras and radiation detectors. And on a recent Saturday evening, a group of young women in dark eye makeup and shroud-like outfits met near the tombs to sample Jello molds shaped like brains before heading out on a pub crawl called a Zombie Walk.

But the most devoted visitors are those who spend hours here to add to “life lists” of birds they’ve seen. Among the species confirmed at Evergreen are the prairie warbler, eastern wood-peewee, black-throated blue warbler, red-eyed vireo, northern waterthrush, ovenbird, Swainson’s warbler, Tennessee warbler, Cape May warbler, bay-breasted warbler, Blackburnian warbler, hooded warbler, summer tanager and scarlet tanager.

“There are several thousand fanatical bird watchers who are competing to get their life lists as high as they can,” said Scott Robinson, professor of ecosystem conservation at the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History. “There are only about 700 species of birds that occur regularly in North America. The only way they can compete with other people is by hopping on an airplane to see every bird that shows up from the West Indies or Siberia.”

Bryant Roberts, an experienced birder from Davie, sparked one of the Evergreen birding frenzies earlier this year when he looked into a small live oak and spotted a western spindalis, a Bahamas species rarely seen in the United States.

“I was excited,” he said. “It was the first male I’d ever seen and the first one I’d found on my own.”

He posted the news on the Web, and word spread fast.

Jody Levin, a jazz singer who splits her time between Long Island and South Palm Beach, heard the news and came to the cemetery in hopes of adding the western spindalis to her life list of some 500 birds. On her second visit, with more than a dozen fellow birders also seeking the spindalis, a professional birding guide spotted it deep in a shrub.

“He was beautiful, as he showed his striped black and white head, his yellow-orange breast and his multi-patterned back . . . and then he was gone,” Levin wrote in an account for the North Fork Audubon Society of Long Island. “Like players on a sports team, we high- and low-fived one another. Strangers bound together by victory, and then we parted, going our separate ways.”

The concentration of birds results largely from the destruction of habitat along migration routes, forcing birds to cluster in the remaining stands of trees.

“It makes for fantastic bird watching, with them all concentrated in one place, but it’s tough on the birds,” Robinson said. “They can’t find enough food. They need to keep moving. Overall, their numbers have declined quite a bit.”

The birding bonanza occurs in a place fragrant with the past. Near one path stands the grave of Thomas J. Russ, 1st. Lt., Co. H, Florida Infantry, C.S.A. In the northwest corner stands a walled Jewish cemetery founded in 1935. Near it is a mass grave for victims of the great hurricane of 1926. At the northeast corner stands the headstone of Crazy Gregg Newell, a bar owner whose wet-T-shirt contests and low-priced beer helped make the city a legendary Spring Break destination.

To visit the cemetery with Roberts, finder of the western spindalis, is to see how much the average person misses.

On a recent visit, he spotted a prairie warbler, an eastern wood-peewee, and a black-throated blue warbler with a strangler fig fruit in her beak.

Roberts himself is a bit of a historical rarity, being a native of Broward County, and this adds to his appreciation of the cemetery.

“That’s one of the interesting things about birding here,” he said, with a glance at the rows of headstones. “I know some of the residents.”

Flying north for its annual fall return to the colder regions of the northern hemisphere, an eyebrowed thrush took a wrong turn and found itself in Jerusalem at 6 am on Sunday.

The thrush was identified at the Jerusalem Bird Observatory of the Society for the Preservation of Nature in Israel’s Urban Wildlife Site by head ringer Shay Agmon.

“This is a mega-rarity,” said Amir Balaban, co-director of the observatory, which is located near the Knesset in Givat Ram.

It was the second time an eyebrowed thrush (turdus obscurus) had been seen in Israel. The first sighting was in Eilat in 1996, and Balaban doubted the bird would be seen in Israel again in his lifetime.

The eyebrowed thrush is not an endangered species in its preferred cold habitats. It is commonly found in the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, Siberia and the taiga (coniferous forests) of the far north, but is rare in the Middle East, Western Europe and the United States.

“It probably joined local song thrushes when it got lost,” said Balaban.

Song thrushes are common winter birds in Israel. Though similar, song thrushes are a “duller version” of the eyebrowed thrush, which is “known for its bluish-gray back and chest, lemon-colored lower mandible, smooth ochre-chestnut upper chest and belly and its trademark beautiful white eyebrow,” Balaban said.

Netted at the observatory’s Bird Monitoring Station, the thrush was trapped, banded, measured, weighed and promptly released. The eyebrowed thrush will face many dangers on its journey, including “feral cats of the Middle East, hunters and lots of uncontrolled pesticides.”

“We crossed our fingers and hope for its safe return,” said Balaban. “It will have to be a very lucky bird.”

Aside from being a thrill for Israel’s birders, 25 of whom “jumped out of bed at the Rare Bird Alert” sent out Sunday morning, the eyebrowed thrush’s presence signals success on the part of the Society for the Preservation of Nature.

“The appearance of rare birds is an important indicator of [the] quality of an urban wildlife site,” said Balaban. “It proves that if we preserve important bird areas in the city, they will be used by both common birds and rare ones.”

Incidents of a seabird preying on colonies of another species at night may be unique to a remote islands archipelago.

Ecologist Will Miles said initial research of great skua preying on Leach’s petrel on St Kilda found the behaviour was unlikely to be common.

The National Trust for Scotland (NTS) has been recording “alarming” falls in the smaller petrels on the islands.

Mr Miles and fellow researchers used night vision gear to observe the skua.

NTS said the Leach’s petrel colony on St Kilda, which it owns, is the largest in Europe and numbers about 40,000 pairs.

Researchers from Glasgow University have been investigating suggestions that great skua, or bonxie, may be eating up to 14,000 petrels every year.

The research on Hirta, St Kilda, will run until 2009.

Results of this year’s work are still being analysed, however, Mr Miles revealed some intriguing insights into the bonxies’ behaviour.

He said: “The skuas are highly active on the petrel colonies at night and catch petrels in a variety of ways - both on the ground and in the air.

“Nocturnal foraging by great skuas is thought to be quite a rare situation.

“At least, it has not been widely reported from the most intensively studied skua colonies on Shetland or from elsewhere across the species’ breeding range.

“The situation on Kilda seems rather unique in this respect.”

Why the bonxie prey on petrels may be down to a combination of factors.

They include limited other food sources, competition between the skuas and when the birds nest close to petrel colonies.

Mr Miles said: “Skuas are highly opportunistic predators and some individuals seem to develop a taste for certain prey types.

“One possibility may be that on Kilda the petrels are a relatively abundant prey type, a few individual skuas have exploited this situation opportunistically and their behaviour has been copied by others looking for an easy meal.”

After assessing the safety of vantage points, the researchers spent nights close to high cliffs, steep slopes and scree boulder fields.

Mr Miles said: “Once on-site, we then stayed put in one watching position for the hours of darkness and just observed the bird activity.”

The vigils were often to the backdrop of the sound of puffins, manx shearwaters and European storm petrels.

‘Elegant seabirds’

Mr Miles said: “The call of the shearwaters is particularly evocative and bizarre - sometimes likened to a chicken with asthma. It is rather a wheezy, wailing sort of call.”

Mr Miles admitted it could be hard to be an impartial observer.

He said: “Yes, Leach’s petrels seem tiny and elegant seabirds when compared with bonxies, so of course it can be difficult to watch a petrel get eaten without feeling some kind of regret.

“Predation is a normal occurrence in nature though, even if rarely observed.”

Data gathered by researchers will be used to help guide conservation efforts for both species.

Alaska’s only elephant is getting a one-way ticket out of town Thursday, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.

After a dispute that lasted months between those wanting Maggie to stay at The Alaska Zoo and those advocating for a warmer climate, the 25-year-old African elephant is heading to the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in San Andreas, Calif.

The Air Force agreed to transport Maggie as part of a training mission after officials with PAWS and the zoo found out the elephant was too big for a commercial airline.

Maggie will be loaded onto a C-17 cargo plane at Elmendorf Air Force Base Thursday evening and brought to Travis Air Force Base, where she will be trucked 85 miles to her new home. She will be accompanied by two veterinarians, two transport specialist, an animal behavior specialist and several zoo staff, as well as Ed Stewart, the co-founder of PAWS.

At the sanctuary, Maggie will have 30 acres where she will live with nine other elephants.

Maggie arrived at the Anchorage zoo as a baby in 1983 after her herd was culled in South Africa. She lives as the sole occupant in the zoo’s elephant house with concrete floors and a small outside enclosure.

The Zoo board initially balked at sending Maggie to another facility. With pressure mounting to do better by the elephant, the zoo embarked on an expensive campaign to improve her quality of life, including building a $100,000 treadmill Maggie couldn’t be coaxed into using.

Pleas to have her moved grew louder this year when Maggie twice couldn’t get back on her feet. Firefighters were called to hoist the 8,000-pound animal into a standing position.

The move became reality after retired game show host Bob Barker promised to donate $750,000 for her care.

Greg Carpenter, 43, said he used to come to the zoo as a kid to see Annabelle, its first elephant. While it’s hard to see Maggie go, Carpenter thinks it is right. He tells 5-year-old boy Garrett that Maggie deserves to be warm and have friends.

“I think it is probably a good thing,” Carpenter said. “She’s probably a lonely animal.”

In retirement, Ballard’s been able to fulfill the dream he’s had since childhood of working full-time with horses, training them to be the best horse they can be.

He does it with his voice and through a gentle touch and kind, but firm direction. The trusting eyes that follow his every move and the ears that flick in his direction are indicative of the bond between Ballard and the horses.

As he saddles up a mare for a demonstration of his techniques, Ballard continues to talk about his passion for horses and how he came to a second career of training horses for himself and his clients at his Southern Cross Horse Ranch near Forreston.

“I guess I was born loving horses,” said Ballard, who grew up on a farm in rural Georgia, where his family raised everything from cows to chickens alongside the crops.

“We had working horses, large draft horses and regular riding horses,” he said, recalling his first horse as a “little red mare.”

Growing up, he and his brothers would slip away and race some of the horses up and down the country lanes near their home, but, somehow, “Dad always knew,” Ballard said with a smile.

Texas always beckoned and Ballard, a genealogy enthusiast who has traced his lineage to relatives arriving in deep East Texas in 1821, himself moved to the Lone Star State at age 17.

“I was born a Texan,” said Ballard, who visited relatives often as a child, telling his family in Georgia he was “going to Texas” before doing so at the earliest opportunity.

Ballard completed college and embarked on an engineering career while starting a family, finding time as he could to work with horses.

“During as much of my spare time away as I had from my career and when I wasn’t needed by my family, I’d spend that time with horses, renewing my training techniques and developing my abilities to do more,” Ballard said.

Retiring about 11 years ago, Ballard has since filled his time with horses, bringing along his own as well as training for others.

He’ll have from two to five horses at any given time at his 45-acre place, where Ballard has set up his residence, a barn, a round pen and pastures.

“It’s comfortable. I get to do what I like to do most of the time,” said Ballard, a facilities operations manager for the SSC project before joining Northern Telecom in Richardson. “I had an opportunity for early retirement and jumped on it.”

Now, his days are filled with the horses he so cherishes. A firm believer in putting in the time and miles on a horse, he works with each about two hours a day, five days a week. He’ll have a good foundation on one of his client’s horses in from 30 to 90 days’ time, working with the owner to carry on with what he’s put into place after the animal goes home.

With his own horses, Ballard continues to work and refine beyond that foundation, estimating it takes him about a year to get one where he wants it to be.

Ballard’s not a horse trader. He buys horses to train for himself, but time and time again, someone sees him on the trail or in competition and makes an offer.

“They’ll finally reach a price where I want them to have that horse,” Ballard said with a smile, noting that horses he’s trained can be found from Washington to New Mexico to Texas. “When people find out I have one, they’re interested enough to pay me a good price.”

He’s sold a few horses in his day, all quiet, well-mannered mounts that know how to put in a good day’s work while keeping their riders safe and sound. For Ballard, it’s all about putting a solid foundation on a horse by breaking down whatever he’s trying to teach it into simple steps - a similar feat to what he did as an engineer.

“As an engineer, you think in the minutest of details, way down to molecule stuff,” said Ballard, who’s never had any formal lessons in horse training. “With horses, you do the same. You learn to watch them and observe - and horses will talk to you and tell you if they’re tight, upset, spooky, scared or just not comfortable doing what you’re asking them to do.

“A horse will tell you, ‘Look, fella, I have no idea what you’re wanting. Why don’t you stop and show me?’ and you show them what you want them to do in bits and pieces,” said Ballard, demonstrating with the mare how he teaches a horse - step by step - to pivot on its hindquarters. “You teach by going through the process. … It’s a cue you build on.”

Everything centers on a good foundation - just like with people and their education, Ballard said, explaining, “If you have a 6-year-old starting school, you’ll start him in the first grade. It wouldn’t be a good idea to start him at the university level. You start easy and work through the process so he comes out successful on the other side.”

With a good foundation, Ballard said, “A horse knows how to do everything he needs to do to be a good horse.”

The work starts on the ground, with Ballard teaching a horse to respond to cues and pressure to move forward, backward, to the left and to the right.

“I won’t do anything on a horse’s back until I can do it on the ground,” he said, noting that, at the same time he’s putting in the foundation, he’s also building a trust between horse and his handler - a trust that ultimately transfers to a rider. “Horses are claustrophobic. The training process teaches them that they can trust their rider to not let them get hurt. You ask them to do something and they’ll trust their rider to cross that stream or bridge, as an example.”

Ballard describes a good training session as “tremendously rewarding,” especially when “you get on that horse today and it’s going well when yesterday he might have been fighting you. … It’s just something to see them mature and see them develop.”

In combination with the physical training, Ballard is continually talking with the horses.

“I talk to them all the time, just like they’re another person,” he said. “They might not understand the words, but they understand your tone, volume and expression. Your tone tells them a lot of what you want them to do.”

He mostly works with quarterhorses, although he’s handled other breeds, including Tennessee walkers and Arabians. Regardless of the breed, the goal is a well-rounded horse that’s as comfortable in the show ring as on a mountain path or in a parade.

“I like to ride in different events,” said Ballard, who, along with his granddaughter Gail, can be found at a jackpot one night, back home training the next day and then participating in a cattle-sorting competition the next.

One of the biggest blessings for Ballard has been finding the same love for horses in his teen-age granddaughter. He babysat Gail as a child - and from the start, she was fascinated with his horses.

“She’d point and look. She’d watch them,” he said. “It was obvious she had the gene I had about truly loving horses. … She’s got a great love for them, just like me.”

The two pleasure ride, train and compete together. Their main competition horse at this time is Dusty Joe Moon, an 11-year-old gelding Ballard jokingly describes as “too big, too long, too heavy and too lazy.”

Kidding aside, the two have been successful with the horse in a variety of competitions, with Ballard saying, “He’s got a lot of things he can do well. He’s a pleasure to ride.”

Looking to the future, Ballard’s already purchased a couple of young colts - one for Gail, one for him - that he believes will form the foundation for a breeding and training operation the two are planning together.

“The game plan is to help Gail so she’s in a position to have her stable of horses, so she’s happy doing what she loves to do,” he said.

A heroic dog and cat were serenaded by a singing dog during the ASPCA awards banquet today, where they were honored for saving their owners’ lives.

The dog, a 2-year-old golden retriever named Toby, performed a modified Heimlich maneuver on his owner, Debbie Parkhurst of North East, Md., when she choked on a piece of apple. Toby pushed her to the floor and jumped up and down on Ms. Parkhurst’s chest until he dislodged the piece of apple.

The cat, a 14-year-old domestic shorthair named Winnie, saved the Keesling family of New Castle, Ind., in March from carbon monoxide poisoning by jumping on a bed and meowing wildly as poisonous carbon monoxide fumes filled the family’s home from a faulty gasoline-powered water pump in the the basement.

Winnie woke up Cathy Keesling by nuzzling her ear and caterwauling. When Ms. Keesling got out of bed, she was nauseated and unable to wake her husband. She called 911, and paramedics found the couple’s 14-year-old son unconscious on the floor near his bedroom.

At the banquet, held at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center, Winnie and Toby did not get their own seats, nor apparently, their own plates of food (though Winnie sneaked shrimp out of the salad course).

Entertainment was provided by Oliver, the dog owned by Chuck Scarborough, the WNBC news anchorman, who was the M.C. of the awards program.

Oliver sang along to music from a harmonica, played by Mr. Scarborough’s nephew.

The honorees traveled fairly substantial distances to receive their honors. Winnie flew into La Guardia Airport, and Toby drove up from Maryland. City Room will observe they were both smart to avoid Kennedy Airport, which has not been a kind environment for dogs or cats of late.

Geneticists have mapped the genome of Cinnamon, a 4-year-old Abyssinian cat from Missouri, making felines the latest animal to have their DNA deciphered.

Why is this important? Cats are prone to more than 250 diseases, many similar to our own. The better we understand their genetic makeup, the better we might develop treatments for AIDS, retinal disease, diabetes, cancer and SARS. (Of course, there’s more than a little financial incentive for researchers to find feline treatments, too.)

Maybe when researchers are done with that, they can move on to what’s really on our mind: why are cats so darn catlike?

And because inquiring minds want to know, according to the press release: “Cinnamon is a shy cat. While the other cats in Dr. Kristina Narfstrom’s ophthalmology research center at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine vie for the attention of veterinary medical students and technicians, Cinnamon is more reticent, preferring to sit quietly and watch the other cats play and carouse.”

A doberman in Australia that was rescued earlier from an animal shelter, repaid his new owners in time by saving their 17-month-old daughter from a deadly snake.

Khan, as his new owners call him, picked up Charlotte Svillicic by his teeth and threw her over his shoulder.

In so doing, the dog took the bite from the king brown, the worlds third most venomous snake, instead.

Charlotte’s mother, Catherine, said Khan leapt into action as the snake edged closer to Charlotte in her garden in Atherton near Cairns, Australia.

“He saved her life by risking his own. If I had not seen it with my own eyes I would never have believed it.” Catherine said. “He grabbed her by the back of the nappy and threw her over his shoulder more than a meter, like she was a rag doll.”

Khan, who received a shot of anti-venom from a vet after taking the snakebite has since made a full recovery.