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.