Birding with Laurel: Galveston Island

January 5, 2020 - morning

Laurel and I left most of our upper coast birding for last, as I was going to be Natalie's house sitter while she went to be with her daughter for her grandson's birth. I figured we could easily bird as long as we got back in time to let the dogs out.  I was pretty sure we could get the early parts of our tour in before that happened. We started our last four tour days with a visit to Galveston and Bolivar Peninsula birding hotspots.

As usual for this tour, I promised many more birds than I could deliver. We stopped at Lafitte's Park on the way to Galveston Park and found only a handful of birds. Often the ponds outside the boardwalk part of the park can keep me entranced for a half hour.  This day they only had a pair of ring billed ducks.

A ring-billed male  duck 

And his female

On  the other side of the pond, around the block, we did find a healthy number of sleeping black crowned night herons. I took a picture of one right by the road.

Black crowned night heron

There were NO birds visible at the start of the boardwalk. We have seen up to five species together there.  We walked on to the large pond and only found a great blue, a pair of buffleheads, and a trio of white ibis.

Great blue heron and bufflehead pair

The back pond only held another bufflehead pair and we found no birds along the walks. This place is best in migration, but we usually find hawks, doves, and small wintering birds here. 

In only a few minutes, we proceeded on to Galveston State Park where I got to visit with my friend who was on duty there. We couldn't access the beach - it is closed for two years as the park gets rebuilt with a permanent visitor center.  But we looked high and low elsewhere until we were too depressed to continue. 

I practiced chasing flying birds on this Forester's tern

Just before we left, I spotted a bird in a bush and walked out far enough to find it was a white tailed kite, one of my favorite wintering Texas birds.  It was kind enough to come closer and stoop, giving me several pictures.

White tailed kite

Stooping

Another picture in the stooping series

That's all folks.  We saw a couple of grebes and a few white ibis through grass but nothing else that was close.  We did see a few little birds but didn't chase them.  And this in a place where a morning walk usually brings in twenty or more species. 

However, I checked back on my blogs on Galveston Island State Park and found I was already complaining of missing expected birds. Check that visit from 2015 here. 

Our day continued with a ferry ride to Bolivar Island and finally to the Bolivar Jetty where we had enough birds to entertain us for a few hours. Stay tuned. 

One of my favorite spring visits to this park gave us forty-seven species and includes one of my favorite bird group picture. Click here for that blog. 

Birding with Laurel: New Year at Choke Canyon

December 30, 2019-January 2, 2020

Laurel and I moved to Choke Canyon State Park to look for birds still common to the Valley, but also eastern and western birds. I always set out food for the birds, picking it up at night to prevent feeding deer, javelinas, and feral pigs. The green jays immediately show up, followed by the other birds that eat oranges. I had black oil sunflower seeds and peanut butter/lard mix I put in cracks of tree bark.  Our days there were mostly cloudy and we were shut out of my favorite birding area, Seventy-Five Acre Lake and the area accessed from it because it was closed for hunting. So, once again we didn't have a huge birding experience.

This was the first time I ever found a brown creeper here - distant and in bad light

All the following pictures were taken from my camp chair, sitting under the shelter over our table.

One of the specialty birds is the black crested titmouse.  It is a very fast moving species but this guy was forced to wait his turn to get a seed and I got a poor picture of him.

Black crested titmouse

The first visitors to our food offerings were the green jays.  Eventually we were seeing up to eight of them at a time.

One of the reasons jays, as well as all corvids are successful is that
they are willing to try most foods

The main reason we put up oranges is to attract the Audubon's oriole. But they are attractive to many other species.

We mainly put up oranges for the Audubon's orioles but they attract many other species

A golden fronted woodpecker checking out the peanut butter mix

Golden fronted woodpeckers eat a lot of different foods as well - this one is enjoying sunflower seed

Gotta get WAY in there to find some juicy parts

Yum

A few bugs would be good about now

A yellow rumped warbler is trying to figure out what all the excitement is all about

A long-billed thrasher visited the area, mostly to check out the activity

As did a Lincoln's sparrow - the ONLY sparrow I saw in the park

A cabbage butterfly on one of the last flowers

One of the most fun block of times we had at the park was photographing and observing a family group of javelinas. It was the first time I've seen baby javelinas since I once almost intercepted a family of them with a few females, juveniles and a boar while hiking in Bentson Rio Grande State Park.

Javalina - relatives of our domestic pig

This mom had two babies - they are also losing their reddish color they had at birth

The day was gray and Laurel was cold, and didn't want to hike so we went out and checked some of the little sub roads and checked out the boat launches to the lake and river. We had several birds along one road as well as some interesting brahman cattle. We had been looking throughout the valley for road runners and saw several dart across the road and disappear before we could photograph them at Falcon Dam. (We took a route that took us by it on way to Choke Canyon.) We finally got this guy, sitting in a tree under the dreary skies.

Roadrunner

Curious cows

We also stopped to check what was behind a tall fence and found exotics.

Nilgai?

Since we were here for New Year's Day, we had to document our first bird sighting of the new year.  It turned out to be a green jay, with the Audubon's oriole a close second.  It had only taken a day to get the birds coming for our offerings.

First bird sighting of the new year

This bird was barely the second sighting for 2020

I actually found the most birds at Choke Canyon way back in 2011.  I captured many of them from my hammock in site 107.  For that story, click here.

Birding With Laurel: Port Aransas Birding

December 24, 2019
After our Goose Island State Park stopover, we continued our trip down the Texas coast to Mustang Island. We left early so we could bird Port Aransas on the way to our camp site at Mustang Island State Park.  Just before we reached the ferry, we stopped to take a picture of a structure that dominates the area.

The ferry trip is so short that you can only get out of the car for about three minutes.  But we grabbed a shot of an oncoming ferry.

As soon as we got off the ferry, we made our way to the Leonabelle Turnbull Birding Center. The light was beautiful and the birds, while not abundant, still were plentiful enough to give us a few hours of enjoyment.

Laughing and ring-billed gulls

Foraging sora

I think this is a female green-winged teal

Lots of activity was going on at the end of the reach of my lens

Several juvenile pie-billed grebes were playing and feeding

The common gallinules were probably the most abundant birds except for white pelicans

Snowy egret sighting his next snack

A green-winged teal showing off his field marks

Two American bitterns were hunting and provided me about a half hour of amusement

Black-necked stilt and mottled ducks

Black necked stilts and reflections

We next tried Charlie's Pasture. Only the old part still exists. The boardwalk part was destroyed by the Hurricane Harvey which did in most of Port Aransas. Again we mostly saw a landscape devoid of birds and had to work hard to get the next two pictures.

Caracara

A Savannah sparrow - if a sparrow sits for pictures, its a Savannah

I enjoyed these corral bean seeds- some people make beads of them, although they are poisonous

After a mostly a non-bird walk through Charlie's pasture, we tried our luck at Paradise Pond.  That has suffered from three factors.  First the land that provided trees around the pond has been cleared and developed. Second, the hurricane, tore out trees. Third, most of the large trees were Brazilian pepper trees and were removed and replaced with little trees. So there are very few birds there.

This was the only merganser we saw in the Central or Lower Texas Coast -
very strange to find it in the pond and not in salt water

We camped at Mustang Island State Park and birded it and Padre Island National Seashore but only found a handful of common birds.


None were worth noting.  Species of birds were notably absent and the numbers of each species we saw WAY down.


Our next landing was a motel in Alamo, Texas where we had several birding adventures.  Stay tuned. This is publishing as I'm enjoying a house party with friends. We visited the Norman Rockwell exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston yesterday and will go on a little paddle today.

Celebrating Global Big Day On Mustang Island

Winnie was going on a birding trip and had me all signed up when I arrived to visit her. Another friend arrived at her house at 6:00A.M. and we took off to Packer Channel Park to meet up with Gene Blacklock, the local bird guru, and several other people. The promised storm petered out before it reached Corpus Christi, but we still had some winds that we thought might bring down migrating birds.

But only a few passerines bothered to stop over, although we did get to see several flocks of Franklin's gulls flying north along the channel. We took out time to roust out the few passerines, including eastern kingbirds, several epidimax  flycatchers, a female Baltimore oriole, and a summer tanager.

Gene, left, and some of the group

We walked the short way to the little Audubon park, where we found one mocking bird, one sora, and one lesser yellowlegs.

Greater Yellowlegs

Sora

Then we started off towards Paradise Pond, stopping at a little willow-lined pond. There we found a great crested flycatcher, a veery, a magnolia warbler, a hooded warbler,  a chestnut sided warbler, a few American redstarts, and a couple of other birds. Of course, great-tailed grackles were ever present and we also saw great numbers of barn swallows that were in their peak migration.

Great crested flycatcher

We stopped again for a mass of roseate spoonbills, mixed in with ibis, various herons, and shorebirds.

Roseates and friends

We then toured the standard birding hot spots in Port Aransas, where I was appalled at the damage from Hurricane Harvey. Paradise Pond had also lost a lot of habitat to development and all the invasive Brazilian pepper trees had been taken down, leaving it both desolate and bare. A lot of the willows were down and dead, but some had a few live shoots starting to grow. And the Leona Turnbull BirdingCenter had lost at least half of its trees and most of its boardwalk. Birds at both places were scarce but we spent a lot of time trying to get good looks at several species of warblers.

View at Paradise Pond over dead and missing trees

The only pair of blue-wing teal at Paradise Pond

Yellow-throated vireo - life bird

Chestnut-sided warbler - these guys were the friendliest and came within two feet of me 

Destroyed boardwalks are still trashing up the birding center

A tri-colored heron hunts at the Birding Center

Nutria at the Birding Center

This picture of a blackburnian warbler shows how the warblers caused our trials in trying
 to capture the little guys with a camera. Both Winnie and I threw out most of our pictures . Many times we only documented the site because the birds could fly faster than we could focus on them. 

We also went to the beach and got to see lots of terns, including: royal, black, common, Foresters, and sandwich, long with gulls and a few shorebirds.

Black terns with a couple of other species

Royal and other terns

After lunch, we went to look at a great collection of shorebirds, including dunlins in breeding dress, Wilson's phalaropes, semipalmated plovers and semipalmated sandpipers, avocets, and other birds. We also saw roseate spoonbills and various herons and egrets. My battery died and I had forgotten to bring a second one.

Dunlin (by Winnie)

White phase reddish egret and dowitchers (by Winnie)

The best bird for me here was an eared grebe in breeding plumage. We were all worn out and elected to stop our tour and go home, even though Gene still wanted to go to the marsh area in the Botanical Garden. We helped get the list ready and Gene will put it up on e-bird for us.  We are joining birders from around the world who are turning in their data.

I checked eBird as I finished writing this on May 5 and found that over 25,000 checklists have been turned in from all over the world. I'm so glad that I could help inventory our local birds and give scientists data.

Did you take part?  If you did, I'd love for you to  share your experience in the comments section. Feel free to link to your blog or your eBird list(s) for Big Day.

This was also Cinco de Mayo.  We celebrated that by eating at the Restaurant San Juan, where we usually sate our hunger and thirst.  It has a wide menu, with good food at reasonable prices. And they have big tables for groups. Also, it is just in front of Paradise Pond, so we don't even have to move our cars.