Great Texas Birding Classic, 4/24/10 to 5/1/10

The second half of April was a very busy birding time. One week after the Frontera Birdathon, our Weslaco Slice-of-the-Good-Lifers birding team (Martin Hagne, John Yochum and myself) competed in the Gulf Coast Bird Obsevatory's Great Texas Birding Classic in the Energy Saver division. We won (as usual!) finding 176 species in 24 hours driving a distance of fifty miles.



Then I flew off to Houston to join David Sarkozi and Tony Frank for the five day long GTBC event, April 27 to May 1, that covers the entire Texas coast. Every day it was get up in the dark to look for owls and tick off birds during the day while racing through the country side till it was too dark to see and then we looked for more owls. Our milage for the week totaled about 1700 and we saw 287 species which was good for second place. The winning team scored 308 species. I got two new species for my Texas list, Barred Owl and Nelson's Sparrow, but I'm not sure I want to to this again. It was exhausting!