My true love gave to me... 90 degree weather and high humidity?
Thursday was a busy day for us, so this post will be pretty long. We drove over 150 miles from Zapata to Brownsville, with multiple stops along the way, had eight lifers and 84 species total for the day. You can skip straight to the pictures here: Texas Day Four.
To get a good start, we were up and out of the hotel room nice and early on Thursday, checking out of a bustling lobby packed with heavy machine operators packing away a warm Tex-Mex breakfast of pancakes and chorrizo. In no time at all we were zipping down the dark and mostly empty two-land highway to our first stop - a good thirty plus minutes away. The goal was to get there early because the guide book said that early morning was the best time to be there for the birds we were seeking.
Our destination was a little town called Salineño, a rustic village off Highway 83 right along the Rio Grande's banks. Its mostly gravel roads converge on a town square crowned with a small Roman Catholic parish. Once you're past the church, the main road softens to hard packed dirt and dips down a hill to the very banks of the river. From a dirt boat ramp you can stand and watch the ripply current flow past. This was a wonderful place, we realized, as we climbed out of our car into a soft subtropical morning. The lapping dark water met close-cropped grass and short bushes under light-green trees on our bank, and dense vegetation on the Mexican side.
It's not just beautiful, but famous for the relatively good chances that it gives you to see two birds whose ranges really only brush the United States - Red-billed Pigeons and Muscovy Ducks. Red-billed Pigeons are dark tropical pigeons that perch mostly unseen in the crowns of trees to feed on fruit. Muscovy Ducks are a large and widespread neo-tropical species of duck that has been domesticated (the only source of domestic ducks outside of mallards) and is common in that form in parks throughout the United States. The only place where they exist in their wild form north of the border, however, is on this narrow stretch of the Rio Grande south of the Falcon Dam. The best part of the wild birds is that they're way more beautiful than their hideous domestic off-spring. They're a deep and usually uniform glossy black with less red in the facial skin than their domestic children, and startling white bright wing patches.
A few minutes after we exited our car, another birder pulled up and got out. He came over, and as we watched the river and chatted, we discovered he was a prolific birder who had seen more than 700 birds in North America, but still had not seen Muscovy Ducks. In fact, he had been to this very spot before more than a dozen times and never seen them. That was a little discouraging, to say the least.
In talking about different places he had been, he mentioned spending last winter in Escondido, California, and chasing a Dusky-capped Flycatcher up in L.A. County! So, it turned out he'd seen the Dusky-capped Flycatcher in Creek Park, and we'd even exchanged a few e-mails back then. The birding world is pretty small. At the present moment, he was working on a "big month," an attempt to see as many birds as possible in one calendar month of the year. Having seen about 350 birds so far in April, he had made the trip down to Salineño for a chance at the ducks.
I'll just take a moment to add that serious birders become very persistent in their attempts to see a desired species. Obviously Leo, the birder at Salineño, had been persistent in his pursuit of Muscovy Ducks, but another birder we met over the weekend with almost 700 North American birds on his list spent twelve hours one day while we were in Texas waiting for a "mega-rare" Crimson-collared Grosbeak to show up at a little Audubon sanctuary down the valley. The persistence usually pays off, as both Leo and this other birder got their birds, but it's illustrative of the dedication people pay this somewhat unusual hobby.
Anyway, the river was pretty active that morning. A Green Kingfisher darted around in the low shrubs on the near shore, a pair of Osprey floated above looking for fish, a big Ringed Kingfisher made sallies at fish from trees on the Mexican shore, and we saw an immense and beautiful flock of Cattle Egrets come rowing downriver. The egrets' white plumage was practically luminous in the morning gloom.
And then, finally, I glanced upstream and saw a big black duck with white patches on its wings crossing the river! Leo got on it, and was jubilant, but Libby didn't have time to see it before it flew out of sight. We waited a few minutes, and then two more came flying downstream above the trees on the far shore! Hurrah! Libby and I exchanged high fives (that's how we roll when we see a new bird) and were giddy with glee.
Our hands were still tingling from the high fives when a small flock of heavy dark pigeons came rushing in directly overhead about 20' above us and disappeared upstream. Red-billed Pigeons! This time we had high fives all around the three of us. Our grins were from ear to ear and we exulted in our good fortune. We would have been content with those poor views, but we saw both species again later on as we worked the area's trails, including a great view of a Muscovy Duck flying upstream just a few dozen feet off shore from us. A Canadian birder dropped in around that time, looking for Hook-billed Kites, and he got good looks at the birds, too, though he didn't find Hook-billed Kites in the time we were there. I guess it was a good day at Salineño.
After that, we spent some time walking the trails in the area and found our first ever Eastern Screech-Owl (a distinctive Mexican race that may be its own species) peeking out of a nest box. We also looked hard for Audubon's Orioles, whose small American range excludes the Valley south of Salineño, but we couldn't find anything but Altamiras. We revisited later in the day and found a male Varied Bunting right along the river bank in some bushes, and a flock of migrant warblers in the trees along the river. Varied Buntings are really beautiful little birds, less gaudy than a Painted Bunting, and adorned in a subtle plum-like combination of blue, purple and red.
After getting our fill of Pigeons and Ducks, we headed back upstream to Falcon Dam State Park to see if we could see some fun desert birds, especially Scaled Quail. It was getting hot by that time and the low vegetation of the area didn't provide much relief, so we did most of our birding by car. We did flush a large flock of gray quail, which were undoubtedly the Scaled Quail we were looking for, but we didn't get a good look at them and couldn't refind them in the scrub. We also saw Pyrrhuloxia, Crested Caracaras, Black Vultures, and Curve-billed Thrashers, which are all fun birds that aren't as common in the lower parts of the Valley. Our one lifer here was Northern Bobwhite, not a bird I associate with desert, but a very handsome quail none-the-less.
Also, we found a turtle!
Soon we were on the road again. We made a quick roadside stop for our first definite Cave Swallows swarming around a bridge before unsuccessfully dropping by a small settlement called Chapeño. The feeders there were once famous for offering the possibility of seeing the only U.S. population of Brown Jays, but unfortunately it appeared to be inaccessible due to heavy construction going on down by the river. I think they may have been working on the border fence. Then we stopped once more at Salineño before heading to Roma for lunch. Roma's an old little border town that's sort of run down, but there are some bluffs there you can view the river from. We ate lunch in the local World Birding Center's backyard courtyard while watching Ruby-throated Hummingbirds and Hooded Orioles come to the feeders.
After that we still had quite a few miles to go. We were heading to Estero Llano Grande State Park - near McAllen, the town where we had stayed the first two nights. It has extensive pools and wetlands, and at the time some Fulvous Whistling-Ducks that I thought would be fun to see. Sure enough, when we got there we talked to an employee in the visitor's center who directed us to not only the ducks, but to a day roosting Common Parauqe! Pauraques are a tropical nightjar that we would have otherwise have had to search for at night, but this way, we just had to pop out our eyes thoroughly scanning leaf litter in a small area for about half an hour before we found it. It's incredibly camouflaged, but we would have doubtlessly have found it more quickly if we had merely walked to the other side of the bush to which we were directed.
We also found the Fulvous Whistling-Ducks, and had our best look at wild Mallards for the trip. The "Mexican" Mallards found in southern Texas lack the green heads of their northern relatives, and resemble the southeastern Mottled Duck. We tried our best to turn them into Mottled Ducks, a bird we hadn't yet seen, but we failed miserably.
Our day wasn't quite over, yet, though! It was still only about five or six in the evening, and we headed straight for Brownsville to find a hotel. That turned out to be nearly an hour between the long drive and figuring out which motel to stay at, and we were really hungry by the time we ate dinner. We settled on a Denny's we could walk to from our hotel for convenience, and had the sort of food you'd expect from a Denny's.
The neat thing about our hotel was that it was right on a little resaca that hosted Laughing Gulls, domestic Muscovy Ducks, Black-bellied Whistling Ducks, and at night, a secretive nocturnal mammal that I think was probably a Nutria.
List of new birds for the day (we'll do a comprehensive and annotated checklist for all the birds later):
1. Fulvous Whistling-Duck
2. Muscovy Duck
3. Northern Bobwhite
4. Red-billed Pigeon
5. Eastern Screech-Owl
6. Common Pauraque
7. Cave Swallow
8. Varied Bunting
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