Author: Steve

Sunday, we didn’t even go birding; we just stopped by Paradise Pond after
Mexican food. We logged twenty birds. Seven of them were new birds for us!
Seven! We’ve seen the western wood pewee before, but not the eastern. The veery is
new, a nice cinnamon colored thrush. We added another thrush, the
swainson’s. We got warblers in breeding plumage. Little sparrow sized
birds dressed up in reds, oranges, yellows, browns, and blacks. The
magnolia warbler, bay breasted warbler, yellow throated vireo, and warbling
vireo. That moves us on the list from 341 to 348. Wow. We’ll have to get serious
about this tomorrow and see what we get.

Monday. We birded for a few hours today. We saw a lot of the same birds we
saw yesterday, plus a few. More than a few. We saw an additional forty
birds. And of those… eleven were new. An american golden plover right on
the edge of the pond in front of our house. A yellow billed cuckoo. We’ve
been looking for this bird for years. It is an elusive swamp dweller.
We’ve never even heard it. We still haven’t heard it. Today we found one
too pooped to move. He stood out on a branch in the open for half an hour
while anyone who wanted to see him got all the looks they wanted. The gray
cheeked thrush. He looks an awful lot like the swainson’s. Blue grosbeak.
He’s pretty good. The scarlet tanager; he is spectacular. Northern parula,
chestnut sided warbler, black throated green warbler, american redstart,
red-eyed vireo, and philadelphia vireo. Whew. Today moved us from 348 to 359 on the bird count. They came so fast our
heads were spinning. Faster than we could keep up. Fortunately for us,
there were some local folks there who were kind enough to help us through
the blizzard of information required to identify all these birds this fast.
Now it’s almost embarrassing having a bird count this high. We’re not that
good. We can spot a new bird and spend half an hour by ourselves figuring
out what it is. Actually, we can spend that long figuring out that it’s a
bird we’ve seen before and figured out before… and forgot. I think we’ve
seen so many birds now, not because we’re good birders, but because we’ve
been so many places. But we’ll keep the count just the same. Tomorrow, we’ll go check out some purple martin condos in Rockport.

We’ve settled at Gulf Waters RV Resort on the beach on Mustang Island for a
week. There is an anniversary coming our direction. We’ll wait here and
see if it finds us on Saturday. We’re right outside Port Aransas. Seafood, barbeque food, Mexican food, a
beach, and birds. What more could a civilized person want?

We usually see coots in the water, so I took this picture when we saw them
out of the water. Goofy looking little round birds.

South from San Antonio, New Mexico to Fort Stockton Texas. Stopped for the
night at the Fort Stockton KOA. We always stop here. Outskirts of town.
Nice enough spots. Food and fuel. Gasoline, diesel, and a fifties café
on-site. We always get chicken fried steak. And it’s a good place for
birds. We pass through here in January. There are a few birds here then,
but not nearly like this. We have great-tailed grackles, western kingbirds,
and doves making a great racket. Mourning doves, white winged doves,
eurasian collard doves, and inca doves. All making their own noise. Then
Judy spotted scissor tailed flycatchers. They’re common here in the summer,
but you never get to see them anywhere else, or any other time. We followed
the flycatchers. This is the first time we’ve seen them in years. We took
a walk down a brush-bordered path. We got cactus wrens. We got a bunny
rabbit. We got more kingbirds. I looked down a side path and declared: “I
want to look down that path and see scaled quail.” I looked down the path.
It didn’t happen. We turned to continue on our way down the original path, and out dashed two
quail. Scaled Quail! Yeaaaaa! Scaled quail. Number 341 on the list.
Scaled quail. How perfect! We and the quail established a rhythm. They
would feed out in the open. We could get within fifty feet. If we got
closer, they moved on. If we stopped they stopped. If we walked fast, they
ran. We followed them for a long time. They probably were exhausted by the
time they got home to tell the kids about the stalkers that almost got them.