New Year in South Texas Dec 27, 2008—Jan 02, 2009
Posted by Kim Eckert
Kim Eckert
Kim Eckert, with over 40 years of birding experience throughout the U.S. and Canada, has now been guiding birders or teaching bird identification classes for more than 25 o...Related Trips
It's entirely possible we set some sort of birding tour record—which I'm not exactly proud of.
After all, when it comes to birding the Lower Rio Grande Valley, the first places which invariably come to mind would have to be Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge and Bentsen State Park, and we didn't stop at either place! Nor, for that matter, did we ever find the time for Laguna Atascosa, a refuge almost as venerable as Santa Ana. Certainly, this was a first for me, skipping all three sites on a South Texas tour, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was the first time any tour had skipped them all.
So, what happened? Simple: too many vagrants and too little time. The best birds were showing up at places like the Frontera Audubon Thicket and Estero Llano Grande State Park, birding sites just a few years old with hardly the reputation of a Santa Ana or Bentsen. And birding tours typically schedule just enough time to cover the usual places to find the expected specialties of the region. In a way, it's almost better if there are no rarities around to alter a tour's normal itinerary. There just isn't time enough to see everything, no matter how hard you try.
But try we did, with our first chase a most successful one into Willacy County northwest of Harlingen to view some staked-out Masked Ducks. You guessed it—this site is not a place birding tours normally go, but it was well worth it for a rarity of this magnitude, a species that's simply not around in perhaps nine out of ten years. I might add that while the ducks cooperated, the weather did not, considering that temperatures were pushing 90, with winds earlier that day gusting over 60 m.p.h.! Also newsworthy on Day One were the dozens of juvenile and sub-adult White-tailed Hawks attracted to a harvested sugar cane field near the ducks. Never had I seen so many in one place, and I found it curious that none of those we looked at was a full adult.
As hot as it was the first day, Day Two was just the opposite. Temperatures only peaked in the low 60s, some 25 degrees colder than the day before, with 20-plus m.p.h. winds this time gusting out of the north, and this was our only day to cover Brownsville, South Padre Island, and vicinity. We found Sabal Palm Grove, normally a very birdy place, to be very quiet, and South Padre Island seemed especially uncomfortable with nothing to diminish the winds blowing in off the water. We had hoped to walk out on a jetty to search for another staked-out rarity (Purple Sandpiper), but, needless to say, wind-blown waves crashing over the jetty changed our minds. Still, the Piping Plovers along a nearby beach seemed more numerous than ever, and at least four Clapper Rails cavorted out in the open along a marsh boardwalk despite the cold.
En route to South Padre, by the way, we couldn't resist the lure of a favorite but relatively unknown site. It doesn't even have a name, as far as I know, yet this inlet off Bahia Grande along Highway 48 almost always has something to offer. Waiting for us this time were four nice species not seen elsewhere: perhaps 100 or more (!) Yellow-crowned Night-Herons hunkered in the mangroves out of the wind, a lone Sandwich Tern (not normally present in winter), a few Gull-billed Terns (uncommon and local in winter), and an entertaining flock of Black Skimmers.
During the next two days in and around Weslaco, McAllen, and vicinity, we added to our list of "Valley specialties"—spectacular and famous birds literally too numerous to mention. We also had at least some success turning up a few hard-to-find specialties: unprecedented numbers of Fulvous Whistling-Ducks (absent many winters), a Common Pauraque sleeping in the exact same place I had seen it in November, and the always-special Tropical Parula at Quinta Mazatlan—yet another relatively new and less-familiar site.
Our next day upriver between Salineño and Zapata produced even better birding, as we started with both a Muscovy Duck and eight Red-billed Pigeons flying by about the same time at Chapeño—and it is no exaggeration to say a typical tour misses both. Interestingly, we saw no fewer than eight species of pigeons/doves that morning (try doing that anywhere else in the U.S.)! A handsome and easy-to-miss adult Gray Hawk posed along the river at Salineño, and, before heading north and back to the coast, we turned up a White-collared Seedeater in Zapata. Arguably, the seedeater is even harder to find than the Muscovy and Red-billed Pigeon.
The tour was punctuated by a most pleasant trip aboard the M.V. Skimmer into Aransas National Wildlife Refuge (finally, we were birding where we were supposed to be birding.) Whooping Cranes, of course, are always the highlight here, although equally significant was a white-morph Great Blue Heron, a bird formerly named Great White Heron and normally limited to extreme southern Florida. The weather was just as memorable, with the first sunny skies since Day One, calm winds, and temperatures in the 70s.
It was almost enough to let us forget about that volatile weather of our first two days. Funny, but when I was back in wintry Minnesota the next day complaining about those temperatures in the 80s one day and down in the 60s the next, I somehow failed to elicit any sympathy!