Texas!

March 4 continued...

Crossed the Sabine River into Orange, Texas at 4:20 PM. and started birding within minutes at the Blue Elbow Swamp/ Visitor Center. Our first bird was a Pileated Woodpecker careening over the highway. Drove to Fort Anahuac State Park, in search of a campsite that may not have existed in the first place (at least we sure couldn't find it). In our fruitless search, we ran across a Great Horned Owl. This bird decided later to hoot insistently above our makeshift camp, which didn't make for a great night's sleep, but may have been some sort of omen?

March 5

We got up before sunrise and headed down to the fishing pier, where we encountered our first pelicans (both Brown and White), Little Blue Herons, Tricolored Herons, Roseate Spoonbills, Clapper Rails, and too many others to mention. In the afternoon we headed to Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, seeing lots of ducks and herons (and alligators) before moving along to the Bolivar Flats Sanctuary. There were so many shorebirds there, we knew we couldn’t identify them all before it got dark. The highlight was a flock of at least a few thousand American Avocets, some with their breeding plumage starting to come in. We took the ferry across the bay and camped for the night at Galveston Island State Park.

March 6
Our first bird of the day was an American Bittern posing in the grass outside our tent, while it was still dark out. We divided time that morning between the beach and the salt marshes across the road, where our path was blocked a couple times by large groups of ibises and cormorants on the footbridge. We watched Northern Harriers and Loggerhead Shrikes patrolling in the vicinity. When we started out for Rockport, the sky was getting dark. On the way, a thunderstorm engulfed us, and we decided camping might not be the best idea, so we pulled off at Fulton and spent the night in a motel.

March 7

In the morning, we took a Whooping Crane Boat Tour, which took us from the harbor to Aransas National Wildlife Refuge waters. There we got great close-up views of the cranes eating blue crabs and dwarfing all the other birds nearby. Other highlights included Long-billed Curlews, American Oystercatchers, and a Reddish Egret. We spent the afternoon on the land portion of the Refuge, where we found earlier migrants like the White-eyed Vireo lurking in the woods. A preview of the tropics, we saw a few Couch’s Kingbirds near the visitor center. We got pretty close to an alligator before realizing. The night was spent in Goose Island State Park, on the southern end of the peninsula where the cranes make their winter home.

March 8

Morning birdwalk on Goose Island with a crew of Winter Texans (mostly from Ontario and Minnesota). One of them offered to show us an Inca Dove nest near his campsite. While we were there, I put my binoculars on something neither he, Abby, or I could even make a stab at. It had a parrot bill, fed like a parrot, but was drably colored and didn’t make an appearance in any guide we could find. Abby made a sketch soon after, and hopefully we’ll be able to figure out the mystery bird (which will almost certainly be something exotic). In the afternoon, we drove down to Brownsville, where we camped in an RV park where a Pauraque was hanging out most of the evening, its bright eyes lit up by our headlamps near the tent.

March 9

This morning, we went to Sabal Palm Sanctuary where we got a whirlwind introduction to the birds of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, such as Green Jay, Plain Chachalaca, and Great Kiskadee. This sanctuary encloses one of the last tracts of un-farmed land down here, and it really felt like a jungle in there. We are beginning to see more warblers beginning the spring migration (Nashville, Black and White, Northern Parula, Orange-Crowned, Yellow-Rumped so far). Tonight we’ll be camping at Boca Chica State Park.

Hoping the wind lets up so our tent doesn’t try to blow away again,

Don

P.S. Sorry for the scatter-shot nature of our posts so far. Internet access has been tougher to find than anticipated (I’m posting this entry in a McDonald’s of all places). We have more pictures to upload too.