Fork-tailed Flycatcher caps a great day, 1/12/19

I got up earlier than usual today with my plan being to drive our old truck to Brownsville to look for the returning Common Black Hawk at the UTRGV campus and then head out to Boca Chica beach.  The hawk took a few minutes to find as I scanned the resaca south of the Biology building where it wintered last year.  I was hoping for closer views but I'll take it.

The Black Phoebe was another campus target for the Cameron County year list.  This species was restricted to the western end of the RGV not that many years ago.

Warblers were hard to come by so I was glad to find this Black-throated GreenWarbler which was my first of the year.

I missed Green Kingfisher and House Finch but decided it was time to head for the beach.  After a straight run without birding stops I made it to the beach by noon.  A high tide made driving on the sand a bit dicey.  Birds were sparse, just the usual Laughing and Ring-billed Gulls, very few Herring Gulls, a few Sanderlings and one Willet.  Once I arrived at the jetty, I grabbed the scope and made the quarter mile scramble out to the tip.  Not much going on our here either.  I did get a brief look at a Common Loon but could only get a photo of the head.  Then it was gone.

My main quarry were Northern Gannets.  During the ninety minutes I spent scoping from the jetty tip I saw only five distant immatures, all headed north.

Closer activity consisted of only common birds like this Forster's Tern, Brown Pelican and Double-crested Comorants.

So I headed back south along the beach with plans to visit the mouth of the Rio Grande.  There were a few more shorebirds along the way, a couple of hundred Sanderlings, twenty Western sandpipers and a Dunlin.

I had just driven past the entrance and was wondering how I would make it through the cut with the tide so high when I got word that John Yochum had just found a Fork-tailed Flycatcher south of the Sugar House pond.  Dang!  That's a bird I need for Hidalgo County.  Well, it was 3:30 PM and the drive would take about an hour so off I raced.  Mary Gustafson, Huck Hutchens, Father Tom and a few others had the bird staked out when I arrived.  Hidalgo County bird # 406.  Pretty good day.

Steve Howell et al in Rare Birds of North America state the majority of the many Fork-tailed Flycatchers found in North American are not of the monachus subspecies from Mexico but are actually austral migrants from the nomimate savana subspecies from South America.  Either way, we sure have been getting more of them in Texas the past few years.