Well, not exactly “in town”. It’s a 320-mile round trip away, but that’s close enough. Off we go to Choke Canyon State Park for the day.
Choke Canyon State Park and Spotted Rail Map
It’s a rare bird, a spotted rail. It has only been seen in the U.S. twice before, and both of those sightings were in the 1970s. A very rare bird. It’s normally only in the Caribbean and Latin America. Birders are flying in from all over the country to see it and add it to their life-lists.
Range map.
Judy and I got there about 11.
We didn’t have to find the bird right off; all we needed to do is find the clump of people who had seen it last and were waiting for it to come back out of the reeds.
That wasn’t hard. A safety conscious bunch; they were nicely separated into family groups and masked.
A stake out. We had the bird pinned down in that clump of green reeds and sedge grass. Saw it an hour later, at 12. A brief sighting, it’s a secretive bird, but a good enough look to count it. Lifer!
After brief glimpses of the bird from close-up, we went across the pond, a little farther away, and looked back. While everyone was standing on one side of a clump of dry reeds waiting for another glimpse of the furtive bird, it came out the other side of the clump, shielded from their view, and gave Judy and I great looks through the scope while it poked around for food. (It’s that black dot on the lower left of the brown clump.)
Our views through the higher power scope were much better than what you see in my I.D. photos.
Just so you know, here is what a spotted rail looks like up close (photo from the internet).
