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Our Saturday trip ended with 15 minutes spent looking out over the water from the Monument Inn parking lot.
An Osprey, two Red-tailed Hawks and some Hooded Mergansers were too far away for photos. So, too, was a male Red-breasted Merganser that was patrolling the ship channel. Luckily, though, this bird then paddled nearer to where I was standing and I was able to take a set of photos of it as it ran through its grooming routine.
Like every good grooming session, this one ended with a good ear scratch.
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Although the lake in the Bay Street Park was empty of ducks, it did have two American White Pelicans, a Great Blue Heron, a Great Egret and ten Snowy Egrets. I enjoyed watching the latter running and jumping around, stirring up prey with their yellow feet.
The most common species at the duck pond was American Coot.
The ducks there included a solitary Lesser Scaup, a few Northern Shovelers (below) and several Gadwall (below).
The sky over the park was busy with Laughing Gulls and Brown Pelicans.
Dee and I were excited to see a male Vermilion Flycatcher hanging out near the parking area. We never fail to be impressed by these stunningly brightly colored birds!
A score of Savannah Sparrows (below) were grazing on the grass while eight Eurasian Collared-Doves (below) shared the trees with Great-tailed Grackles.
Judging by the noise coming from them, the reeds near the lake were full of Red-winged Blackbirds. We didn't see a single Blackbird, though, perhaps because a Red-shouldered Hawk was lunching at the edge of the reeds.
Our picnic over, we drove up to San Jacinto State Park, where I once again spent 15 minutes vainly looking for the Harris's Hawks that have been wintering there. One of these days I'm actually going to see these birds!
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As the weather was good this weekend, we headed down to Texas City on Saturday morning to meet up with some friends and, hopefully, to see Common Loons, shorebirds and some different ducks.
A drive along the dike was rather disappointing, yielding mainly Herring, Ring-billed and Laughing Gulls, some Forster's Terns and a few Sanderlings.
However, we did see three Common Loons, one of which came close enough for reasonable photos.
The area where the dike joins the mainland had more gulls, along with a couple of Royal Terns. It was odd to see Great-tailed Grackles and Rock Doves/Pigeons wading with gulls.
A Willet was prowling in the shallows.
Willets are very drab birds - until they unfold their wings!
Apart from Willets, the only shorebirds we spotted were half-a-dozen Ruddy Turnstones.
The area also had several Brown Pelicans, a couple of which allowed me to approach within a few feet.
After an hour at the dike we drove the short distance to the Texas City Bay Street Park, where we had a picnic lunch. As I will show in my next post, the park had quite a range of birds even though it didn't add to my year list.
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We spent part of Saturday with friends visiting the Texas City Dike and the San Jacinto State Park area. This trip produced plenty of interesting birds, including some new ones for my year list, and I'll report on it later this week. However, the highlight of the weekend was undoubtedly a Sunday morning visit to a fellow birder's yard in Houston.
Sue Orwig lives near the Edith Moore Nature Center and has created an amazingly beautiful and successful backyard habitat for birds, including several species of hummingbirds. Dee and I visited in February last year and saw our first-ever Buff-bellied Hummingbird. This year Sue was kind enough to let me come over at 8:00 on Sunday morning and then to spend 90 minutes leading me around her yards and showing me no fewer than six species of hummingbirds.
I wasn't able to get sharp photos of the first species we saw - Broad-tailed Hummingbird - but I fared a little better with one of several Rufous Hummingbirds.
I failed again when trying to photograph Calliope, Allen's and Black-chinned Hummingbirds. However, I was more successful with my personal target, Buff-bellied Hummingbird.
Sue's yard didn't only have hummers, of course. Among the many species present were Pine Siskin and Red-breasted Nuthatch. A Wilson's Warbler in the yard was a new 2013 bird for me, as was a Pileated Woodpecker in her neighbor's tree.
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After the excitement of my visit to Sue's, I spent some comparatively quiet time watching the birds in our own front yard, where the seed and suet feeders nonetheless were bringing in a constant trickle of birds. As usual Carolina Chickadees, Northern Mockingbirds, Orange-crowned Warblers, and Downy Woodpeckers (below) were the most frequent visitors.
Our winter resident Ruby-crowned Kinglet would slip in whenever other birds were absent.
Numerous American Goldfinch (below) were accompanied by a couple of Pine Siskins.
Two or three Red-breasted Nuthatches were frequent visitors, too.
I wasn't surprised to see a Brown-headed Nuthatch turn up again, but I was surprised to see no fewer than four of them coming to the feeders and the birdbath.
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As last Saturday was warm and sunny, I didn't expect our yards to be very busy with birds. As it turned out, I couldn't have been more wrong!
The day started with flyovers by several skeins of Black-bellied Whistling Ducks, totalling about 150 birds. For weeks now I have seen similar flocks fly north every day before dawn; the flocks fly south over our house every day at dusk. When I returned from Kleb Woods in the late morning, a Red-shouldered Hawk was circling in the distance.
After that I spent most of the afternoon watching our feeders through our living-room windows.
The most numerous species was American Goldfinch, with 30+ individuals visiting.
Orange-crowned Warblers and a Ruby-crowned Kinglet (below) appeared every few minutes to feed on suet.
A couple of Chipping Sparrows (below) and Yellow-rumped Warblers (below) popped in occasionally.
Two of our normal winter residents were missing - Yellow-bellied Sapsucker and Pine Warbler. However, this was more than offset by the continuing presence of three less common winter visitors - several Red-breasted Nuthatches, a Brown-headed Nuthatch, several Pine Siskins (below) and two Rufous Hummingbirds (below).
Most of our year-round residents appeared as well - House Sparrows, Northern Cardinals (below), Carolina Wrens, Carolina Chickadees, a Downy Woodpecker, a Red-bellied Woodpecker, a Northern Mocking bird and a Blue Jay.
The seed feeders in our front yard were attracting a handful of White-winged Doves.
More surprisingly, a couple of Mourning Doves grazed on the grass below the feeders. These are birds that used to visit often but that we now see only rarely.
The biggest surprise of all was an Eastern Phoebe, who perched briefly on our back fence before moving to the birdbath in our front yard.
So we had our biggest one-day total of yardbirds ever: 22 species. In fact, we really had 23 species, because we saw a third hummingbird that wasn't a Rufous but we were unable to ID it.
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