It’s getting to that time when listings of the best of the year come out for many things. Here are some of my best birds of the first quarter of 2019 – nice to remember on a cold December spitting snow day.
We took an abbreviated trip to Florida and later spent several weeks in Arizona.
After 1600 miles of travel, we are settled into one our favorite state parks — Fontaiinebleu State Park, and enjoying grey skies but warmer weather. Here are some birds we’ve seen enroute and here at the park.
As I was scanning the lake shoreline yesterday, I spotted this guy out in the water and others in costumes with drums going and people on the beach watching the going’s on. A Creole ceremony, a mid-week wedding? I moseyed over that way, met a guy who was watching the equipment tent, and learned that it was a Canadian outfit shooting a music video. The performers and director was from Canada, having flown in that morning, and a local crew was shooting.
Fontainbleau State Park, on an old sugar plantation on Lake Ponchratrain, is filled with wildlife. Deer, relatively tame, watch us as we tend to the van or walk the camp roads.
It is great to see our northern birds, such as Yellow-rumped Warblers here in force. Southern birds, such as Loggerhead Shrikes like this one, are also fun to see once again.
Here is a sampling of others we have seen on this first birding stop of the trip:
Great Egret
Killdeer
Northern Mockingbird
American Coot
We are off to Texas today and anticipating some cool rainy travel weather but next week in the Rio Grande Valley look good. Buenos dias, mis amigos.
After delaying several days for dangerously frigid weather, we got the van dug out and started and launched Sunday in -13 degree weather (we hit -21 on the road that morning) and after three long drives and motel stays, headed to Fountainbleau State Park in LA where we are resting for a day.
We’ve been out on a couple of walks and I’ll be posting a few photos tomorrow. It"s fun to run a camera with warm fingers.
After thawing ourselves and the rig out at Fontainbleau State Park where we took a long walk and saw this Bald Eagle along with a number of American Coots, some Common Gallinules, and numerous kinglets and warblers.
Here are a few other shots from our stay.
We headed westward on I-10 for a night at Sam Houston Jones State Park in Lake Charles, LA. It was dark as we set up and Penny had her first encounter, this trip, with an armadillo. They drive her nuts.
Before leaving Thursday, we took a long walk and paused by this young Long-Needle pine tree.
Off to the Lone Star State. Happy trails to you all.
By Louisiana standards, it was a bit chilly as we headed out birding yesterday.
We took a leisurely walk yesterday and saw dozens of birds, including this shy Yellow-rumped Warbler who along with his cousins, was foraging with the underbrush. Not that easy to spot until he moved. Can you spot him?
Fontainebleau State Park is located on the northern end of Lake Ponchartrain and home to many shore and water birds like these cormorants, one of whom has a nice meal in its beak.
The Loggerhead Shrike often sits quite patiently for prey and photos.
And you never know who or what is hidden in the Spanish moss. Good birding my friends.
January is always a dicey month, weather-wise and we took an extra day to better prepare and to give me a chance to check Grow Compost for the other rare gull that has been hanging out there. Sure enough, driving in for a quick check, I spotted the Glaucous Gull – a life bird among the chickens and Herring and Great Black-backed Gulls.
Thanks to our friend Terry with a last minute sanding job on the icy driveway, I positioned the Interstate in downtown Montpelier and early Wednesday morning, we launched for Pennsylvania. It was a long trip but uneventful although the tractor-trailers on I-81 were their usual challenge — many of them and all moving fast.
We visited Sally’s brother-in-law in Charlottesville, Virginia the next night and after a long drive and just beating a sleet event, we hunkered down during a tough storm that shutdown the region. Two days later, we are at Fontainebleau State Park in Louisiana still battling sub-freezing nights but the forecast is great. Yesterday, we took a cold walk and saw dozens of Eastern Bluebirds and other neat birds, including this Red-headed Woodpecker who was feeding with his buddies.
Today is a thawing-out day for the rig and for us. We intend to stay here for a few days after a long trip and wait for the 70 degree temperatures tomorrow.
I think it was the dozen Eastern Bluebirds I saw as we drove in to Harrison Bay State Park in Tennessee, or else the flock of Pine Warblers at Clarko State Park in Missisippi, but about the turn of the year, it was obvious that "We are not in Kansas anymore." In the first four days of the year, I picked up 65 species, mostly birding as I walked the dog after the day’s travel.
One of the birds I see at every stop is the Eastern Phoebe – this is a Mississippi bird:
As a pilot, I was trained to keep a continuous scan pattern going, and I try to apply it driving. Check the road, the mirrors, the speed, and the fields and air for birds. I know the dangers of texting or talking on a phone – it is obvious when I see speed changes or lane weaving. Birding can be just as distracting if you are the driver so I stick to stuff in front of us. On a stretch on I-10 through Louisiana, I got Cattle Egrets, a Great White Egret that flew up in front of us, several Red-tailed Hawks, some Black-crowned Night Herons, and some Great-tailed Grackles at the rest stops.
We are in Goliad State Park in Texas and leave Monday for a two-week stay in Mission, where we will join some birder friends and immerse ourselves into the special place of the Valley. We have been without wifi for a week and our working off the iPads with crappy 4G coverage – but here, if I can upload them, are some bird shots from the last few days.
While birding with Penny on a trail at Village Creek State Park in Texas, I heard an unfamilier call and then this Eastern Towhee popped up:
Here at Goliad, there are many Ladder-backed Woodpeckers. The size of a Downy, they move a lot and are hard to photograph. This one is on the move:
Early Sunday morning, I saw this Red-shouldered Hawk before it saw me, and I got a great look – until the dog spooked it. I was able to get a long-range shot although it was watching us like a ….. hawk:
There are hundreds ot Turkey Vultures circling all day – right out of a Hitchcock film. In the morning, the trees are draped with them. Here are some getting ready for bedtime:
One of my favorite southern birds is the Great Kiskadee. They are noisy, colorful, and rather plentiful along the Rio Grande, and after a while, easy to take for granted. I hadn’t seen one in two years and didn’t expect them up in Goliad – so it was quite a pleasant surprise to hear their call and then see a pair. This one waited patiently for a long-range photo op.
The park ranger warned us this afternoon that it was going down to freezing tonight and that we might want to let our water hoses drip. There is a cold snap (for South Texas) coming but we are moving southward in the morning and should be ok. I stored my winter stuff in the truck today – Mary, who is wiser, is keeping hers close by for another few days.
I was out looking for a bald eagle’s nest at Fountainebleau State Park when a Texas auto pulled up. The driver asked if I’d found it and having been there before, helped me locate it through my scope. When I asked if they were birders, he replied, “No, we are geocachers from Biloxi.”
Well, I knew what geocaching was since our grandson, Mac, had just gone on a Cub Scout geo outing. When my new friend asked, “Want to see one?” I followed him up to a little path into the underbrush. He reached down and lifted up a root, showing me the drilled hole in the underside, with a small cylinder inserted. He showed me the rolled up log sheet inside – and I was hooked. I went to his website (Gulf Coast Geocachers)read up a bit, downloaded an iPhone app, and was off and running.
Here’s a little of what I learned (from Wikipedia):
Geocaching is an outdoor sporting activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called “geocaches” or “caches”, anywhere in the world.
A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing a logbook where the geocacher enters the date they found it and signs it with their established code name.
Geocaches are currently placed in over 100 countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica. After 10 years of activity there are over 1,532,000 active geocaches published on various websites. There are over 5 million geocachers worldwide.
So, I’ve done some geocaching at Fountainebleau and Lake Fausse Pointe in Louisiana and at Village Creek annd Goose Island state parks in Texas. I find that it goes well with dog walking, biking, and birding and like the fact that it gets you outside. I also like the geeky aspect of gps and online record-keeping and tracking objects around the country and the world. I also like the inter-generational potential of it; kids love it.
So for now, it’s a “give it a try” activity to check out. When the birds are resting, it is a chance to get out the iPhone and see where the closest geocache might be. And perhaps, there’s a new bird waiting there as well.
We moved today from Fontainebleau State Park which involves jumping on to I-12 which hooks up with I-10 out of New Orleans. It’s never fun and today, with the temperature a muggy 79 degrees, it seemed worse than ever. The haze hung over the wetlands and the tractor-trailers made life miserable.
Things got worse as we headed past Baton Rouge in a windy section with heavy traffic. A kid in a car beside us yelled something and pointed toward the back of our rig as we navigated some curves. I swung into a breakdown lane, just after an on ramp, and carefully exited the truck. The traffic roaring by was scary but as I went to the back of the trailer, I saw what they had been yelling about. Our electrical cord had escaped from the holder and was dragging the plug down the highway. Talk about road rash — the plug looked pretty sad as I stowed it safely away.
Getting back on and up to speed was tough and then we nearly missed a split of the highway, needing a quick change to a left lane but then we were over the Mississippi and things got a bit more quiet. The GPS route to Lake Fausse Pointe State Park looked a little crooked but I wanted off I-10 so we followed the routing. I told Mary, ” It looks like a goat path on the map.” Louisiana doesn’t spend a lot of money on their back roads — the road we were on was narrow, pock-marked, but straight with a speed limit of 55 mph. No way was I going that fast on such a road, which wound back and forth, through little hamlets, past many fishing camps, and eventually coming to a pontoon bridge, ending with a sudden lurch up over a levee on to a real road. (The park ranger, hearing my route, told me that several bigger rigs have lost antennas and mirrors on that bridge.) We won’t be going back that way.
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| A pontoon bridge rated at 5 tons (now what do we weigh?) |
Nearly every camp/home we passed on the “goat path” had a name: “Bud’s Swampland.” “Who Dat?” …. It was an interesting look at rural Louisiana but it was nice to get on a wider highway for the last 15 miles down to the park. As we listen to peepers this evening, it’s a far cry from the chaos of Interstate 10. In spite of the mosquitos, I prefer this setting much more.