Tis the season...for Christmas Bird Counts

 I have been consumed with birds the last few weeks. First I started going birding to remember some species I haven't seen for several years. Then I signed up to do four Christmas counts. Two of them were back to back and one a few days earlier. 

The Galveston Count will be remembered as super foggy and bird sparse. I drove an hour and a half through thick fog to get there, only to stand around and wait for almost an hour, until we could see anything but the gulls and great tailed grackles.

Then, on the way to our first spot on East Jetty, both our leader and I got stuck in the sand, for another half hour delay.  Then we could see shadows of birds but they weren't their usual colorful selves. We birded in the fog until about 11:00 AM.  Then we REALLY noticed the lack of birds. We missed species that are found every count year. Many of the avian scientists and experts think we lost thousands of birds in the big freeze last year, and the extremely warm temperatures are causing birds to linger further north.

Even the gulls didn't want to fly in the fog

This was a few hours into the count and we could see mergansers 

Sanderlings in the fog

The same group of birds an hour later 

Then came Brazos Bend Christmas count on a day with a 90% chance of rain.  Fortunately the rain waited until almost noon.  After the first soaking, our group of seven suddenly turned into a group of three: best friend, Natalie, Leader Bruce, a favorite partner in crazy adventures,  and me. We ate lunch under a group shelter and kept hanging out until the rain settled down to just a light rain. Natalie left about 4:00P to feed her dogs. Bruce and I continued to look for birds until supper time. 

It appeared that only about a tenth of those who signed up for the supper showed up.  We were urged to eat all the BBQ we could hold, then take home bags of leftovers.  All the windows were open and the night rapidly got colder. Soon we were shivering in our wet clothes and couldn't wait for the species to be called so we could leave. The first count was 137 species, several species under the expected 150 or so. 

The next day was the Freeport Count of which Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge is a part. I was signed up to count birds on a part of the auto tour with one other lady.  I soon found out why the Freeport count is always one of the top ten in the nation. We were divided into pairs and given a very small area to cover. I lucked out in getting a young woman as my partner. She was a fabulous spotter and took pictures of every bird or group of birds we saw.  We started off on an exciting note - we got a low flyover of thousands of birds. Most were laughing gulls. Emily took picture after picture of them and reported back that there were two ring-billed gulls in her pictures. Other flyovers included ibis, duck species, sandhill cranes and snow geese, all seen in black and white against a grayail sky. We sat for at least 30 minutes feet away from our starting point, till the sky finally emptied of birds. We didn't find a lot of expected birds or large numbers, except for flyover birds, and sleeping black crowned night herons. The best birds of the day were a Virginia Rail that Emily saw and photographed in the two seconds it was in sight, and the bird I begged for and got in the last bit of time we had - a white-tailed kite. 

Greater White Fronted Geese 

Virginia Rail (Photo by Emily Neale)

Snow geese flyover the following day in beautiful light

I went to the supper at the Wurst House in Lake Jackson. I enjoyed the German Food and was excited to find Victor Emmanuel was there.  He started the count when he was sixteen years old and apparently has helped with it ever since. I have met many of the people who run his tours and he showed me my first bobolink when I encountered him at a birding site in Pennsylvania, giving a couple a private tour. He talked to me because I was wearing my Anahuac rail shirt. And my friends and I had a wonderful tour of King Ranch with his Nature Tours people.  

Happy Holidays and hoping you all have a great next year.

Looking for Rarities at King Ranch

I wanted to do a tour at King Ranch, so checked on the cost. It was within my budget If I could get several more friends. Eight of us arrived at the visitor center before 6:00 A.M. and boarded the van for a trip to the Norias Division, about an hour away.

Our first stop, a little after dawn where we saw Vermillion flycatchers, hooded orioles, and a barn owl

We arrived in fog and a misty rain but after about an hour, the weather improved and we had cloudy to partly sunny skies the rest of the day. Our guide, Tom, was a master birder and could find birds even in the early dawn hours. He stopped soon after we started down the narrow, vegetation-lined road to show us a ferruginous pygmy owl. It was still too dark for pictures but we did get another one to let us photograph it. This owl is diurnal and will call in the day time. After it attracts birds to come mob it, it sometimes makes a meal of one of them.

The ferruginous pygmy owl has false eyes on the back of its head

And regular owl eyes in the front

We found hooded orioles and also one of their nests, which they build under and over reaching palm frond.

Hooded oriole - this was at Benton Rio Grande State Park two days earlier

Hooded oriole nest

The ranch has some exotic animals, including impala and nilgai.  We got a quick glimpse of a running nilgai but the three impala hung around and we saw them several times.

Impala

The area has been getting lots of rain all spring and is very lush.  We traveled over fields dotted with trees and down into a wonderful oak forest that grows over old sands. Northern Bobwhite called, ran along the road, and in the tracks we took across a grasslands area where we saw dicksessels and a great horned owl with three nestlings.  A few minutes later I saw a lifer, a Botteri's sparrow which was fiercely protecting its territory with its song.

One of dozens of northern bobwhite

Dicksissel

Singing Botteri's sparrow

Flycatchers loved this habitat.  We had lots of couches kingbirds, a few tropical kingbirds, several brown-crested flycatchers, and near the end of the day had our only eastern kingbird. 

Brown-crested flycatcher

We saw or heard lots of these greater roadrunners

Wild turkeys were everywhere.  We saw them across fields, around the buildings, and out in the live oak forest.

Rio Grande Wild Turkey

A view into the live oak forest

The oak forest was an amazing place.  As the mesquite changed to oak, we saw lots of butterflies.  One of them was very special  and rare - an eastern Mexican white skipper, first seen in the United States in 2007.

That rare east Mexican white skipper

Swallowtail

One of our target birds was a groove-billed ani.  As we entered an area with more trees, Tom told us to tell him if we saw any grackles because they would be anis.  Minutes later, Natalie called a grackle and Tom stopped and played the Ani call.  We had two anis come in and sit out in the open and pose.

We had enough light to see the gray edges to the ani's feathers

We spent the last part of the afternoon, in the oak forest area,  hunting that tiny, nondescript bird with the big call, the northern bearded tyrannulet, as well  the tropical parula. We were successful on the tropical parula but not the tyrannulet. Otherwise, we got all our target birds except for the white-tailed hawk, as well as a total of sixty-four species.

This tanager, Audubon's oriole, titmice, and a cardinal came in while calling the
northern bearded tyrannulet

The very happy tour group at the end of a wonderful day

Sorry for the late blog.  But I didn't have many good pictures from two days of birding - not many birds and really bad light. So I thought you would rather come along on this tour with me. Hope you are finding good birds where you live.

A Magical Monday

Our spring is continuing with a parade of days with cloudy skies and lots of rain. The big rain storms of Saturday and  Sunday caused migrant fallouts, some in time to be enjoyed by Featherfest tours.  We went outside early Monday morning to find several migrants in the yard: indigo buntings, baltimore orioles, American redstarts, white-eyed vireo, summer tanagers, and even several of our here-to-for missing ruby-throated hummingbirds. A common yellowthroat fell to the ground almost at Natalie's feet.

A Baltimore oriole recharges after a hard night's flight

We had planned a paddle for the afternoon and had been watching the forecasts anxiously, hoping the little window of opportunity - chance of rain under twenty-five percent - would hold up.  By mid-morning the clouds were clearing and soon we were under a brilliant blue sky with a few fluffy clouds drifting about. The temperature was rapidly climbing and it looked like a perfect day to paddle on Sheldon Lake and check out the nesting water birds.  Natalie announced it as a Houston Canoe Club trip and several other people came to paddle with us, some of them my old friends and others new.

I planned to paddle Swamp Sprite, my solo canoe, just out of hospital itself, but, when I got back from doing a little birding with Winnie, before she left, Natalie had already loaded a kayak for me. I was glad she did, because it was somewhat windy and the little blue kayak (Eddyline Merlin) paddles like a dream, no matter what quarter the wind is coming from.

Natalie's car at the put-in 

A cypress tree decorated in neotropical cormorants - couldn't ID the background bird

White Ibis

Will shows off his beautiful paddling style in a canoe I sold him several years ago

I couldn't quite catch the anhingas' conversation but I think they were talking about the deterioration of the neighborhood when that other species moved in

This is not a breeding spoonbill so I don't know why it was in the rookery

Birds are just starting to nest. Some years, most of the trees behind the paddlers are speckled with nests and birds

Little blue herons were abundant and pairing up

Cattle egret 

What could be better?

A few white ibis

An immature white ibis hangs with a spoonbill

The day remained perfect and clear until we were on the way home after eating a delicious scallop dinner with some of the paddlers. Then the sky started clouding over as the rain chances once again began rising. By early Tuesday morning, we were, once again, experiencing thunderstorms and heavy rain.  What kind of magic was that?

Me, the very happy camper, trying to stay in place in a little wind

On the personal front, my friend I was so excited about seeing, had to cancel her trip.  But since we were planning to bird together and with friends, I'm going to do a slightly modified version of the trip. There are more adventures to come. I'll be driving to Corpus Christi as this blog comes out and will be birding in the Valley in a few more days. Stay tuned.

Cattle egrets were starting to do a little hanky panky. This one is dressed in his party clothes.

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