Since we like it here so much, and since we come here every year, we decided
to buy our own little piece of Texas. A very little piece. An RV site.
And here it is. They’ve poured the concrete slab and the patio. They’ll put in some pavers,
landscaping, and utilities, and it will be ours, complete with little palm
trees. Next time we visit, we should be able to park right on our own site.
Port Aransas
Uh oh! Problem. We’re on the coast and the spring migration is still going
on. All those little songbirds spend the winter in South America, then
migrate across the Gulf on the way north. They’ve been flying nonstop
across all that open water, so they stop to rest as soon as they get here.
That accounts for the high concentration of birds. For those of you bored
by bird counts, better hang up now.
Port aransas
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.
Port aransas
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.
Gulf waters
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?