Two birds to go. Golden winged warbler and hudsonian godwit. Today we continued the godwit quest. Up at 4am for a drive to the Valley. Estero Llano Grande State Park, the most recent place to report the hudsonian godwit. They reported them early in the day, so we were there before 8am. We spent four hours there. We saw eighty birds. We saw some really cool ones; fulvous whistling ducks, least grebes, least bitterns in a nest, green herons, stilt sandpipers, ground doves, white tipped doves, parrots, cuckoos, groove billed anis, common pauraques, green kingfishers, chestnut sided and blackburnian warblers. We saw and heard a hundred of those darned chachalacas Jon and I couldn’t get on the big day. They were everywhere just like they’re supposed to be. We didn’t see any hudsonian godwits. We drove home. Two birds to go.
Life Birds
We lost a life bird today. That happens though. Things change. Sometimes what was once one bird is split into two or three separate species. Sometimes separate species are combined back into one bird. I don’t know who the great minds of birding are; but they promulgate these rules and we birders, we’re an orderly lot, we follow them. Today we lost a bird off our life list. It wasn’t for a classification reason like I just described though. It was due to an arithmetic error. An arithmetic error in our birding software. I just upgraded to the next version. To make sure all the sightings we’ve recorded over all these years migrated properly to the new program, I called up the life list. To my surprise, it wasn’t 505, it was 504. One bird gone. No problem. I compared the new life-list to the old life-list, bird by bird. At ten birds they were even. At twenty birds they were one off. I checked off the individual birds one by one between ten and twenty. They all matched. The difference turned out to be that the old bird list skipped the number 16. It jumped from 15 to 17; right there between cattle egrets and reddish egrets. A computer program that can’t count? Didn’t expect that! Tonight we’re getting the rainstorm we’ve been waiting for since last November. Nice powerful thunderstorm. Now the electricity is out and the rain has settled down to slow and steady. Here’s hoping the electricity starts up and the rain keeps up.
Gulf Waters
An odd bird sighting here. A northern bobwhite; right in our RV Park. I don’t think concrete, mowed grass, and oleanders are his natural habitat. Brother Tom kept him spotted with the binoculars while I got some pictures.
Two birds to go
In the evenings I’ve been watching the shorebirds from the tower at the birding center to get the white-rumped sandpiper. I had it all figured out by size which bird he should be (bigger than a western sandpiper but smaller than a dunlin), but from that distance I couldn’t make out the plumage pattern to make the call; not even with the scope. Then, finally, it flew. White rump! White rumped sandpiper. The only small shorebird with a white rump when he flies. Now two birds to go: the golden winged warbler and the hudsonian godwit. I think the time has passed for the golden winged warbler but we’ll keep checking Paradise Pond just in case. We might have one more weekend for the hudsonian godwit.
Turtles
Eventually, the turtle returned, crawling, resting, working its way back to the water.