Tag Archives: buntings

Peveto Woods, Louisiana: Spring Migration Hotspot

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FatherSonBirding is a labor of love for both Braden and me, and our goal is to entertain and educate, and to promote bird conservation. If you’d like to support our work, please consider buying one or more of Sneed’s books and make a donation to one of the bird-related groups mentioned below. Thank you!

There’s a good reason the blog has been quiet the past couple of weeks. Braden is finishing up his honor’s project before graduating (gasp!) from the University of Maine while I jumped on a chance to head to Texas for the sixth time since Braden and I began birding. The trip arose from an invitation to talk about my book Birding for Boomers at the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association spring conference in San Antonio. Happily, the event took place during spring migration, so I of course booked three extra nights before and three extra nights after the conference to see some birds!

As soon as I picked up my rental car in San Antonio, I high-tailed it the four hours to Winnie, Texas on the coast just east of Houston. Why Winnie? Because it provides great access to several well-known stopover places for migrating songbirds and offers a chance to soak up a variety of coastal and aquatic species as well. For this trip, though, I was determined to explore some new birding areas, and my first morning I got up before dawn and headed to my first destination, Peveto Woods Sanctuary, just across the border in Louisiana.

A bonus to driving to Peveto Woods is that once you cross the bridge into Louisiana at Sabine Pass, you can find a wonderful little shorebird area, especially if it happens to be low tide. And by the way, I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of posting Black-necked Stilts. So sue me already!
Peveto Woods offers delightful paths through trees, any one of which could be hiding a migrating songbird!

Peveto Woods is owned and operated by the Baton Rouge Audubon Society and like Sabine Woods run by the Texas Ornithological Society and the more famous High Island sanctuaries operated by Houston Audubon, Peveto consists of a patch of forest right along the shore. As soon as I pulled up, I knew I was going to like it. Trails headed off in all directions, crisscrossing forty acres of mostly oak-dominated woodlands. I saw two friendly-looking guys, Scott Delaney and Paul Wallace, who looked like they knew their way around and asked the best way to explore. It turns out, they had been volunteering their time here for many years and suggested I make my way to the east fence line and work my way back. They also explained that the land where the woods sat was called a chenier, a place where wave actions had piled sand and shells up higher than the surrounding area, allowing trees to grow. Hurricanes still occasionally obliterated the place, but the vegetation recovered quickly.

Hey, I’m gettin’ pretty good at these selfies–this one with my new birding friends, Paul (center) and Scott.

Unfortunately, I quickly learned that the main birds I had hoped to see—warblers—had not yet arrived in significant numbers. I was about a week early for many species and, for now, northerly winds had kept others grounded in the Yucatan. Only one hundred yards down the trail, however, I encountered a nice little mixed flock of other species. Sound ID picked up a White-eyed Vireo, and I quickly saw a Warbling Vireo along with at least four Red-eyed Vireos. Joining them were several Orchard Orioles, a couple of Yellow-rumped Warblers, and an Orange-crowned Warbler. Most were flitting about high in the trees, making photography difficult, but my heart warmed at seeing them.

Although the more exotic warblers had yet to reach the Gulf coast, this (Myrtle) Yellow-rumped Warbler tried to hold down the fort till they arrived!

One awesome thing about Peveto is that you can walk right out to the beach and here I saw the trip’s first Black-bellied Plover, along with a couple of Royal Terns and Willets.

For those aware of my love of Black-bellied Plovers, you can imagine how delighted I was to find the first one of the trip on my very first outing.

Returning to the woods, I kept strolling, finding migrating Gray Catbirds and pre-migration White-crowned Sparrows. A couple of Anhingas flew over, and then Sound ID picked up what would be the star of my visit: a Yellow-throated Vireo.

I just fell in love with this Yellow-throated Vireo. In fact, YTVIs are one of my new favorite birds, and I would see or hear them twice more on the trip.

I had seen YTVIs before, but so early in my birding career that they had gotten lost in the steepness of my learning curve. Now, a bird in glorious yellow, white, and gray plumage perched right above me. I shot some quick photos, and then just stood and admired this incredible creature. Like most other vireo species, this one had migrated from Central or South America, completing the eighteen-hour or so flight directly across the Gulf of Mexico.

It seemed like years since I’d seen Indigo Buntings—and then, only females or juveniles. That made it all the more sweet to find these two “Sharp-dressed Men.”

It did make me wonder, though, why the vireos had made it “on time” but most of the warblers had not. “Are vireos stronger fliers?” I wondered. Or had they just timed things better? Either way, I was delighted to see them and get to know them better. And that’s birding for you. Even if the birds don’t always meet your own timetable, they always present a fascinating learning opportunity or two—or, as today, a chance to embrace and enjoy a new group of birds. I rounded off my morning by finding a couple of gorgeous Indigo Buntings on the brushier end of the preserve. I exchanged email addresses with my new friends Scott and Paul, and invited them to look me up when they came to Montana. I suspected, though, that I might make it back to Peveto Woods long before they got to Montana!

My checklist: https://ebird.org/checklist/S223902911

Note: As I post this, the warblers are definitely arriving at Peveto Woods. If you live nearby, what are you waiting for?

The Road More Pipit (Grassland Birding Part 2)

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The burbling call of a Long-billed Curlew echoed across the dry fields as my dad and I stepped out of the minivan to listen. We stood on a dirt road about 20 miles west of Malta, craning our necks as we squinted at the sky, searching for a tiny dot that might be a Sprague’s Pipit. The unnamed road ran smack-dab through the middle of some of Montana’s best pipit habitat, and after missing several other prairie and marsh specialists at Bowdoin that morning (including Baird’s and Nelson’s Sparrows and Sedge Wren), we had come here for one last-ditch effort.

Even for us, it’s hard to get our head around the fact that Long-billed Curlews we’ve seen in, say, Morro Bay, California (above) fly to the grasslands of Montana to breed. We’ll take ’em, though!

Unfortunately, we had limited pipit experience to draw on. We’d only seen one before, in a thunderstorm on a road-turned-to-gumbo last July. Nick Ramsey had spotted that bird as we had frantically knocked mud off our car wheels, so we’d never even found the species by ourselves—making locating one now seem like a long shot. Thankfully, few clouds loomed on the horizon, meaning we probably wouldn’t have to deal with another thunderstorm.

Our search tactic involved conducting five-minute point counts every half mile, getting out of the car and listening for the birds. This was how most pipits had been detected on this road in the first place, and thanks to the science project I’d worked on last summer, I knew roughly how long to stay at each place before designating it “pipitless” and moving on. 

The first couple of points produced good birds, but nothing of exceptional interest. Vesper and Grasshopper Sparrows sang from the tufts of grass along the fence, and a few acrobatic Franklin’s Gulls spun in the sky above us. At places with more dense shrubbery the dry, buzzy trills of Clay-colored Sparrows joined the grassland chorus.

Our “Road More Pipit” also boasted the greatest numbers of Lark Buntings we’ve ever seen!

Then the scenery changed. Rather than parking next to fenced-off rangeland, the habitat on the left side of the road turned into a more natural-looking swath of native shortgrass prairie. As I got out of the car, I swore that I heard what eBird describes as the sound of “a cascading waterfall of tiny pebbles.” I’d been continuously playing the song as we’d driven between points to instill it in my head, so I couldn’t tell if what I’d heard was just my own brain playing back the song of a Sprague’s Pipit or not. Then, I heard it faintly again. As my dad grabbed his camera from the car, I set off into the prairie after the sound, flushing a pair of Ring-necked Pheasant from a bush. I climbed several ridges, watching my footsteps for rattlesnakes, until it sounded like the bird flew right above me. I looked up, and suddenly saw it—a tiny speck hovering in the blue space between the clouds, singing away.

Here’s a Sprague’s Pipit—Not! If we were to show you a photo of one, it would look like a tiny dot in the sky. This American Pipit, though, looks almost identical to its much rarer cousin, so we ask that you pretend.

After showing it to my dad we just stood there watching what would have been the most incredibly boring part of birding for many people—but not for us. The pipit never descended, and instead slowly drifted further and further away until it was out of sight. We’d found a Sprague’s Pipit on our own! Of course, we knew that they were in the area, but locating an individual bird was still no small task!

The pipit was just the beginning of the prairie species we spotted on that road. As we kept driving, we began to pass large numbers of displaying Lark Buntings, which flew up about five feet before floating down, compared to the pipit’s display hundreds of feet above the earth. We passed a cattle grate, flushing a quintuplet of Sharp-tailed Grouse, several of which posed on the side of the road for us. Some of the Lark Buntings flashed white rumps, revealing themselves to be Bobolinks instead, which had a very similar display to the buntings, and in a very short-cut grain field I spotted three Chestnut-collared Longspurs. We’d ticked off most of Montana’s prairie birds on just this one road! Thrilled and relieved by our success, we got back on Highway 2 headed west, ready for the birds of Glacier National Park.

There’s no better reason to celebrate than finding your very own Sprague’s Pipit—though maybe graduating high school comes close!