Subject: Texas birding
Date: Apr 24 20:41:57 2000
From: Constance J. Sidles - csidles at mail.isomedia.com


Hey tweets, I stole a nine-day week last week and flew to the upper Texas
coast to see the spring migration. I had been watching an Eddie Murphy
movie called Holy Man with my kids. In it Murphy, who plays a religious
saint, turns to the audience and says, "You know, each of us has only 75
summers, 75 springs. Make the most of them." I realized that I have far
fewer than 75 springs left. That made me determined not to miss another
spring migration due to silly concerns such as work deadlines. I was off on
a plane three days later.

I visited High Island (great, as ever), Sabine Woods (my favorite), Big
Thicket (really really big) and Anahuac (not much). Sabine Woods was
especially wonderful, in the fullest sense of that word, along about 3
o'clock in the afternoon, when the newest arrivals from the Yucatan would
dematerialize before our eyes. A group of birders would mosey over to a
bench on the boardwalk, near a couple of water pools made by digging out a
shallow scrape in the leaf litter, lining it with a black garbage bag,
filling with water, and decorating with branches and rocks. Texas has been
very dry for a long time now, so water is scarce. Even without a drip, the
migrants were drawn to our pools. We birders would chat quietly, slap
mosquitoes and wait. Minute by minute, more birds would fly in and begin
feeding as fast as they could. The highlights I saw:
Swainson's warbler
Golden-winged warbler
Blue-winged warbler
Worm-eating warbler
Louisiana waterthrush
Northern waterthrush
Ovenbird
Chestnut-sided warbler
American redstart (first-year and full adult)
Black-throated green warbler
Yellow warbler
Yellow-rumped warbler (both kinds)
Cerulean warbler
Yellow-breasted chat
Common yellowthroat
Orange-crowned warbler
Tennessee warbler
Nashville warbler
Northern parula
Black-and-white warbler
Yellow-throated warbler
Prothonotary warbler
Blackburnian warbler
Kentucky warbler
Hooded warbler
Painted bunting
Wood thrush
Gray-cheeked thrush
Swainson's thrush
Veery

I also saw pine warblers and brown-headed nuthatches at Big Thicket, as
well as a whole kettle of Mississippi kites right overhead. Missed the
red-cockaded woodpecker however, after a huge snake zipped across the path
in front of me and I realized I was all alone in an undeveloped part of the
reserve and that was probably pretty stupid.

At Anahuac the highlights were upland sandpipers and buff-breasted
sandpipers, up close and personal. Now it's back to reality, but what
wonderful memories. - Connie Sidles, Seattle
csidles at mail.isomedia.com