Brown Pelicans

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One of the great things about going to the Upper Texas Coast is that you can be sure of seeing Brown Pelicans. When we were staying in Surfside, flights of these magnificent birds constantly passed overhead from dawn until dusk every day.


In fact, we saw so many that grandson Danny thought that "pelican" meant "bird".




When we got to the bird sanctuary beach on Bolivar, we were able to watch Pelicans up close.


It quite a thrill to watch them taking off and I never fail to be impressed by their incredible wingspan.







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Beach Birds

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One of the highlights of our recent vacation was being able to drive along the beach for several miles eastward from Surfside. This allowed me to check out different sections of the seashore for birds - and to get much closer to birds than I could have done on foot.

The beach was beautiful in the mornings.






Flights of Brown Pelicans crossed the sky every few minutes.




Small Sandpipers were very common. I think this one is a Semipalmated.


I took a lot of pictures of American Oystercatchers!


Most of the larger Terns were Royal Terns, but there was the occasional Caspian Tern.


All along the beach Brown Pelicans were diving constantly into the sea.




Laughing Gulls outnumbered all other bird species. I wasn't going to bother photographing them but then I started watching how they ran through the surf to launch themselves into flight.


Brazoria NWR

On two mornings, I drove over to Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge. This site has not yet totally recovered from the effects of Hurricane Ike in 2008 but I still always enjoy visiting it.

My early-morning arrival at the pond near the visitor center scared off a Great Egret and several Roseate Spoonbills.


Some Black-necked Stilts and Dowitchers were less skittish.

Dowitcher

On a later visit, a Swainson's Hawk circled high above the same pond.


Elsewhere on the autoloop, several Clapper Rails were very audible but very difficult to see.

A Least Bittern flew over too fast to photograph, while this young Yellow-crowned Night Heron decided the best thing to do was to stand still as I passed.


On my way out of the refuge I spotted a Great Horned Owl.


It was my first Great Horned of the year and a good sighting with which to finish the visit to Brazoria.
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Surfside

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It will take me a while to sort out the photos from our recent time on the coast but here are some initial comments and pictures.

Surfside didn't have as many shorebirds as I was expecting but the beach certainly had enough birds most days to keep me occupied.

Brown Pelicans were among the most common birds and I spent a lot of time watching them fishing. Unfortunately, the ones that were fishing were always too far away to allow good photos. However, on their way to and from the sea they frequently passed right over our heads.




The beach had scores of Royal Terns, including this youngster begging for for food.


Black Terns were plentiful also.


Willets, Sanderlings and Ruddy Turnstones were everywhere.

Ruddy Turnstone and Sanderling

Juvenile Ruddy Turnstone

Mixed in among them were a few Black-bellied Plovers.


I was pleased to get daily opportunities to watch one of my favorite birds, the rather comical-looking American Oystercatcher.


Great Blue Herons and Snowy Egrets appeared now and then.

Snowy Egret

There were Great-tailed Grackles a-plenty, too, including many molting males.

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A Birding Day

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It really annoys me how so many wildlife sites have fanciful and misleading names: "Bobcat Woods," "Alligator Nest Pond," "Armadillo Trail," "Warbler Walk," etc. Just about the only thing you can be sure of in these places is that you won't see any of the animals mentioned in the sites' names. It's rather like the way many housing subdivisions have names that are either totally inappropriate (e.g., "Rocky Glen Drive" in totally flat Cypress) or that describe landscape features (e.g., "Oak Lane"or "Prairie Way") which were probably destroyed to make way for the subdivisions.

I mention this to explain the frame of mind I was in the other morning when I parked outside Bobcat Woods on the San Bernard NWR.

I got out of the car and walked towards the woods. A cat crossed the trail ahead and slipped under a fence rail. A domestic cat, of course. Or was it? I walked over to the fence and looked down. Five feet away, a bobcat looked up at me. We stared at each other for several seconds. Then I broke the spell by reaching for my camera, and the bobcat trotted off through the vegetation.

I will never complain about misleading signs at San Bernard again - even though I didn't see a single Water Moccasin at Moccasin Pond or a single Rail at Rail Pond!

San Bernard NWR
San Bernard was my first stop on a long birding drive I was doing and it was not at all productive in terms of birds.

The entrance road had a Loggerhead Shrike and a pair of Turkey Vultures.


Otherwise, all I saw were a couple of wading birds and a lot of Red-winged Blackbirds and Great-tailed Grackles.




After 45 minutes, I decided to press on to my second destination.

Brazoria NWR
Brazoria is one of my favorite sites but on this particular day it, too, was extremely quiet. A couple of alligators were lazing in the water.


The largest concentration of birds I saw was a group of twenty White Ibis and Roseate Spoonbills.


Disappointed by the lack of birds at the two marshland refuges, I decided to try a very different type of site: the beach at Surfside.

Surfside
Unlike the other two sites, this one was very busy. Unfortunately, though, the busyness was due to people and cars rather than birds. A brief drive along the beach revealed only Willets, Sanderlings and Ruddy Turnstones and so I left the coast and headed north.






Brazos Bend SP
I didn't reach Brazos Bend State Park until early afternoon, the very worst time for wildlife viewing. However, as always at this great site, there was still plenty to see.

Yellow-crowned Night Herons were everywhere, some with impressively long plumes on their heads.


Anhingas and Common Moorhens were very much in evidence, too.




This Purple Gallinule was one of four I saw in about as many minutes at 40-Acre Lake.


Given that I'd started the day with seeing a bobcat, it seemed appropriate that my final sighting should be of another mammal: a raccoon exploring the edge of Elm Lake.


Year List
The Purple Gallinules took my year list to 207 species.
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A Brief Visit to Surfside

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On Saturday I was leading a workshop in Lake Jackson and decided to take advantage of the trip to pop in to the beach at Surfside. I hadn't been there since September 2008, when we were rudely forced to interrupt a vacation by Hurricane Ike.

The area was in much better shape than I expected, although birds were few and far between. The weather didn't help either; it was one of those very misty gray mornings.

Although most of the gulls I saw were Laughing Gulls, one Herring Gull put in an appearance, taking my year list to 100.


A Great-tailed Grackle looked very stately if a little out of place on the beach.


Several Ruddy Turnstones (species #101) looked much more at home ...


as did a handful of Sanderlings and Willets, and a solitary Black-bellied Plover (year bird 102).


On the drive back to Lake Jackson, several cormorants were lined up on wooden pilings by a roadside pond and I was thrilled to see that there was a Neotropic mixed in with the Double-crested.

Neotropic (left) and Doble-crested Cormorants

So that took my 2010 list to 103, with a week of January still to go. Not a bad start to my birding year!

Raptors
Red-tailed Hawks continued to be very common: I saw 10 on this trip. American Kestrels were even more common, although the lighting conditions made it impossible to get any good photos.