Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Sugar House Pond, 8/8/23

I checked out the Sugar House Pond today.  With the past two months of no rain and 100 degree weather, water is drying up fast on this 40 acre effluent pond and it's shorebird season so there was a lot to see.  I needed to catch my bearings after popping up on the berm and being overwhelmed by thousands of shorebirds, but it didn't take me long to pick out a Willet.  There were at least five of these hard to find for Hidalgo County shorebirds.


A bit later I found my bird of the day, my fourth ever Marbled Godwit for Hidalgo County.



Then it was just a matter of scoping over the large flocks.  I picked out ten Semipalmated Plovers.


A lone Snowy Plover was a bird closer.


But the Black-bellied Plover was nearly a quarter mile away on the opposite side of the pond.


The rest of the nineteen species of shorebirds were more common species like this flock of Long-billed Dowitchers.


There were also hundreds of Stilt Sandpipers but I didn't get much in the way of photos today so here's one from ten days ago.


I only managed to find one Pectoral Sandpiper.  Here it is with a Lesser Yellowlegs and a couple of Wilson's Phalaropes.


It's about time to find a mega rare so I need to get back out there again this week.  In the mean time I will search though these photos and see if I missed anything.


Sugar House Pond (FM1425), Hidalgo, Texas, US
Aug 8, 2023 8:09 AM - 10:31 AM
Protocol: Traveling
0.2 mile(s)
38 species

Black-bellied Whistling-Duck  50
Fulvous Whistling-Duck  10
Mottled Duck  1
Common Gallinule  1
American Coot  50
Black-necked Stilt (Black-necked)  600    Five to one ratio with Avocets
American Avocet  122    Counted carefully through scope
Black-bellied Plover  2    Two breeding plumaged birds very distant from one another
Snowy Plover  1
Semipalmated Plover  10
Killdeer  20
Marbled Godwit  1
Stilt Sandpiper  1500    Five to one ratio with dowitchers
Baird's Sandpiper  2
Least Sandpiper  500
Buff-breasted Sandpiper  20
Semipalmated Sandpiper  3
Western Sandpiper  300    Lots of em
Long-billed Dowitcher  300
Wilson's Phalarope  500
Solitary Sandpiper  1
Greater Yellowlegs  5
Willet  5
Lesser Yellowlegs  200
Laughing Gull  1
Gull-billed Tern  2
Black Tern  250    Counted through scope
Snowy Egret  2
Tricolored Heron  1
Cattle Egret  3
White Ibis  57
White-faced Ibis  66    Counted thru scope
Roseate Spoonbill  1
Bank Swallow  5
Barn Swallow  2
Cave Swallow  1
Red-winged Blackbird  10
Great-tailed Grackle  40

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