South Padre Pelagic

Let me back up now. All the way to July of this year if you don't mind. Shelia and I bought a new travel trailer - a Chalet Arrowhead. It's an A-frame hard-sided pop-up trailer. Cute, huh? We have been talking about getting one for a while, and the situation finally presented itself and we bought it. With all of the birding we do it really opens up a lot of opportunities for us.
It goes up really easily.

First we put up the roof, then it only takes one of us to put of both walls. The whole process only takes a couple of minutes. Then we hook up the water and the gray-water hose, chuck the wheels, uncouple the truck and we're in business. We store most of our stuff under the bed while we're in transit so we take that out as we need it. We were done so quickly this first time we really surprised ourselves! And it's fun too. The air conditioner works great and we were cooled down and enjoying a cold glass of water before we really knew what hit us.

The next day was our Pelagic trip. Eric Carpenter arranged the trip and people attended from all over Texas. The seas were calm and the sky was clear. This was my first Gulf pelagic and it was really fun. We were out a long time, and we didn't see large numbers of birds but we still had a great time. No one got seasick and no one got crabby. Amazing!

Shorebird Class Field Trip

Shorebird Class

Last weekend we went on the Upper Texas Coast field trip with our Travis Audubon Shorebirds class. Led by Tim Fennell, our group of 16 traveled from Austin to Winnie and Bolivar with many stops in-between. The goal - see as many shorebirds as we could while not ignoring the avian diversity along the way.

Tim Fennell

We left Hornsby Bend as a group at 7:00a.m. on Saturday morning in 4 cars. Our first stop was Shipp Lake, a pull-over stop along Hwy 71 where we started out strong with several shorebird species including Stilt, Solitary, Pectoral, Least, Spotted and others.
Our next stop was Attwater Prairie Chicken NWR. This was my first time to visit that refuge, and it's beautiful. At a couple of "pull-over" stops on the way there we added Upland Sandpiper but missed our expected Buff-breasted's. At Attwater we had excellent viewing at a low pond, adding new species as well as having close views of some we'd already seen.
When we left there we immediately pulled over to check out a recently-mown field and saw perhaps hundreds of Buff-breasted Sandpipers. Wonderful!
We drove through Houston in a traffic jam and in the rain. Fortunately, on the entire trip we managed to be in vehicles when it rained!
Our time on the coast was well spent. After checking into our hotel we went out to Bolivar and traveled around the inland roads and Rollover Pass. We spent sundown at Rollover Pass and it was a beautiful sight. That and the alternate plumage Black-bellied Plover and Ruddy Turnstone capped our birding just fine. Dinner at Al-T's was a quick one, and then we fell in bed at 10:30.
Early Sunday we were at Boy Scout Woods which was very quiet except for the buzzing of the mosquitos - they were fierce! We left there pretty quickly and went right to Bolivar Flats. The shorebirding was fantastic. Our first birds on the beach were Piping Plovers and it just got better from there.

One of our best birds of the day was this Lesser Black-Backed Gull

Early Morning on Bolivar

We went from Bolivar to Smith Point where we visited the Hawk Watch tower - not much happening there. We finished our birding day at White Memorial Park where we added Red-headed Woodpecker, Tufted Titmouse and Eastern Wood-pewee to our list.
A wonderful trip - thanks especially to Tim Fennell for leading a fun trip to the coast.