A New Site

.
On Saturday I decided to make a first attempt at improving my Chambers County bird list and so I persuaded Deanne to go with me on a day's birding trip to the area.

As my Chambers list consisted almost entirely of birds seen at Anahuac NWR, I thought the best way to increase it would be to visit some other sites, and preferably ones that offered different types of habitat from Anahuac. After doing some quick research, I settled on White Memorial Park, just south of the junction of I-10 and Highway 61. According to "Finding Birds on the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail," the park is a good place to visit if you want to see woodland birds and the latter are just the kinds of species that my county list lacked.

When we got to White Memorial, we started by exploring the sides of the creek. However, we soon moved over to the wooded areas because, while beautiful, the creek was very quiet for birds and horrendously busy with mosquitoes.

The first birds we spotted were American Crows and Carolina Chickadees, soon followed by Eastern Bluebirds, a score or more of which were chasing each other through the treetops. An Eastern Wood-Pewee and a Yellow-throated Vireo put in a brief appearance, followed by several Eastern Kingbirds.

Eastern Kingbird

Trees along the main park road had Red-bellied Woodpeckers while the area near the lake had a Red-headed Woodpecker and a flock of Common Grackles.

The lake

It was still too early for lunch and so we opted to leave the park. While it had not been as birdy as we had hoped, it certainly had a lot of potential and we resolved to visit it again before too long. Oh, and it had taken my Chambers list from 93 to 101 species.

We decided we would drive down to have our picnic at the hawk watch area at Smith Point. We had been to the Point once before but had seen very few migrating hawks, partly because it had never stopped raining. Perhaps this time we would be luckier with the weather and would get to see some birds.
.