Category Archives: Texas

Turkey Day Texas Adventures Part 1: Pursuing Plovers

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Join Braden and me at our last book signing of the year at The Well-Read Moose in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho this Friday, November 23 at 6 p.m. Also be sure to share this post and subscribe to our blog in the box down on the column to the right. Happy Thanksgiving!

I just returned from speaking on an author panel at the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English in Houston, Texas. It was a terrific event, but I confess that I looked forward to Texas birding possibilities even more!

As soon as I picked up my rental car, I headed toward Winnie, Texas, racing the sun so that I could have an hour or so at Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge before bedding down for the night. I arrived a little later than desired, mainly because of a couple of irresistible caracaras and a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher that almost literally flagged me down. Still, I managed thirty minutes driving the Shoveler Pond Loop. I needed at least an hour but managed fun looks at White and White-faced Ibises, Common Gallinules, a Black-bellied Whistling Duck, and a surprise Common Yellowthroat.

Semipalmated Plovers greeted me at Rollover Pass on the Bolivar Peninsula.

The next morning, after a stop at Rollover Pass, I headed to the Houston Audubon Society refuge at the tip of the Bolivar Peninsula. Before the trip, Braden had been drilling me on plovers, and his work paid off. Plovers are well-known for their ability to distract potential predators by faking wing injuries or sitting on “false nests.” Except for the ubiquitous Killdeer, however, they were a group I’d never knuckled down and studied before and I hoped to see all of the Big Five on my list: Black-bellied, Snowy, Wilson’s, Piping, and Semipalmated. At Rollover Pass, I’d found a number of Semipalmated, so that left me only four more at the Bolivar sanctuary.

Unfortunately, the long beach of the sanctuary seemed bereft of the numbers of shorebirds I had hoped for and I struggled to ID many of the birds in their winter plumages. I patiently began picking away at them, though. “That’s a Willet. I know that one. Those are Sanderlings. Hm…is that a Dunlin? I’ll have to ask Braden about that one later.”

Winter-plumage Black-bellied Plovers were one of several shorebirds I at first couldn’t identify. Once I got them, though, I got ’em!

Then . . . jackpot. Suddenly, I was seeing plovers in all directions. The problem? Identifying them! The two kinds around me looked very similar. Both were tiny and had broken breastbands. Individuals of both also had leg bands. Still, one kind was definitely darker than the other and they had distinctly different-colored legs. When I showed my photos to Braden, he affirmed my thoughts: I had seen both Snowy and Piping Plovers. As a bonus, I saw numerous Black-bellied Plovers, too!

I didn’t realize until after my visit that Piping Plovers are an endangered species, with only an estimated 8000 individuals according to BirdLife International.

Four out of five plovers? I’d take it—especially because Piping and Snowy Plovers are both endangered species due to their preference for the same beach habitats that humans enjoy. These little, cool birds definitely made up for the shortage of gulls, whimbrels, jaegers, and other birds I’d also hoped to test myself against.

Even better, my Thanksgiving Texas birding adventures had just begun . . .

This Snowy Plover surprised me as I’d only seen them on the West Coast before. Note the darker facial markings and differently-colored legs than the Piping Plover in the previous photo.

The Rarest Bird in Brownsville

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Plain Chachalacas at Estero Llano Grande SP.

Braden here. During the beginning of February this year, my dad and I had the great opportunity to visit and bird in southern Texas, one of the U.S.A.’s birding meccas. We saw tons of cool birds in South Texas, including sought-after species such as Altamira and Audubon’s Orioles, Green Jays, Buff-bellied Hummingbirds, Plain Chachalacas and more. We also missed quite a few species, including Green Kingfisher, which was a real thorn in our sides. Our rarest bird, however, was a Common Grackle at Estero Llano Grande State Park near McAllen, Texas. Let me explain.

When we first arrived at ELGSP’s visitor center, we ran into a trio of birders talking and watching birds from the center’s deck. The visitor center was quite possibly the best we had run across so far on the trip, with a gift shop, nice bathrooms, and a huge outdoor deck overlooking a lake. On most sides were also fruit or seed feeders, and at any given time one could pick up 20 species by standing in one place and turning in a slow circle.

One of the birders introduced another as the “legendary” Huck Hutchens, who had helped get the state park started in the first place in the early 21st century. He explained that being a resident, while we were marveling at the Great Kiskadees flycatching over the lake, he was here for one reason: to find a Common Grackle. He had just returned from a trip to Virginia where he had seen thousands of grackles, but here they were a rare sighting; their range did not extend past central Texas. Suddenly, as he was using his binoculars to comb through a large flock of Red-winged Blackbirds gorging themselves on seed, he shouted “I’ve got one!” We all found it, a surprisingly bronze animal among the horde of black. It reminded me of something Noah Strycker, holder of the 2016 Global Big Year Record, had said: Birders went to great lengths to find rare vagrants to their region; why not just go where they’re common? This was also one of his reasons for doing a Global Big Year.

The grackle certainly wasn’t the coolest bird we saw on the trip, or even that day, but it was a very interesting one. What made it even better was that we got to share it with other birders who enjoyed it just as much (or possibly more, in Huck’s case) as we did.

This Northern Parula was another species that we “weren’t supposed to see” on the trip.