Midnight out on the boardwalk at the Birding Center marsh in Port Aransas listening for rails. It’s calm and quiet, just like we need so we can hear; no wind. We got sora, common gallinule, and our target bird: Virginia rail. A good start. The Virginia rail is a new year-bird for me. On to Cove Harbor to listen for Clapper rail. I made a map of all the places we went. 2017 Big Day map. Heard the rail! River road for King Rail. (Different rails like different habitat.) Got it. Still really dark. Drove to Duke Bridge for barred owl. Heard it before we even got out of the car! Drove west to Choke Canyon State Park and surrounding area to listen for western birds at sunrise and see fulvous whistling ducks when it got light. This is going really well. We’ve already seen or heard 85 birds, and now I’ve got 4 new year-birds. Not only are we going to have a Big Day, my year-list is going to get a lot bigger too. Back east to Riverside Park in Victoria. That was good for Mississippi kites, red-shouldered hawks, red-bellied woodpecker, yellow-throated vireo, blue jay, and a pileated woodpecker landed right in front of us! We’re at 115 birds and it’s not even noon. Another 5 year-birds. 125 birds by noon and we’re picking up steam. It was good at Goose Island State Park. Now we’re seeing coastal birds. I’ve gotten another 9 year-birds. A stop at Sunset Lake Park, and we’re off to the middle of Corpus Christi for migrants by 2pm. Spirits are high, as they always are at this time of day. All we need is a good migrant year to have a really big day. This is also the point in the day where we usually have a flat spot and things slow way down, but not this day. This day the migrants were great. We arrived at Blucher at 2:30 and started racking up migrants. Worm-eating warblers. Hooded, swainson’s magnolia, black and white and Kentucky warblers. We’re at 170 birds. We moved on to Rose Hill Cemetery and kept on finding warblers, flycatchers, and tanagers. Cerulean warbler and blackburnian warbler. 180 birds. It’s all good. Time to head out to the island. More migrants. Almost all the shorebirds we needed. A whimbrel. Every place we stopped was good. Every stop added birds to the big-day list. We finished back at the Birding Center in Port Aransas with a marsh wren at 8pm. Nueces County was really good to the Big Day list and my year-list as well. I got 23 new year-birds, just from Nueces County, for a total of 41 new year-birds in just one day! I already had a pretty good year-list going, but this is fantastic. The results: This is an annual competition, consisting of teams of two birders each. It just happens that Jon and I are the only ones that know about the competition, and the only team to ever compete. Our old record was 207. (We did 220 once, but that was not really the same kind of big day. For that one we did 24 consecutive hours, but spread over two days so we could cover more habitat.) For this for-real Big Day, we did 550 miles of driving, with 26 stops, 20 consecutive hours of birding, and demolished our old record with 218 birds! Big Days are not about taking pictures, but how could we talk this much about birding without any pictures of birds? I’ll put up several pictures, then put the key at the end. You can see how many you got right.
Key:Female Summer TanagerSoraWorm-eating WarblerPectoral SandpiperBay-breasted WarblerLeast BitternWhimbrelRose-breasted GrosbeakGull-billed TernSooty Tern
Key:Female Summer TanagerSoraWorm-eating WarblerPectoral SandpiperBay-breasted WarblerLeast BitternWhimbrelRose-breasted GrosbeakGull-billed TernSooty Tern