South Padre Island, 11/13/15

Here we are in mid-November with a cold front blowing through so I headed out to South Padre Island to see if I could find any unusual sparrows.  Well, my instincts were dead wrong and I found no sparrows at all. But there were plenty of birds including nine species of warblers.  This young male Black-throated Green Warbler will get prettier as the winter passes.

It's getting pretty late for a Magnolia Warbler.

I have a difficult time getting photos of American Redstart.  They are so hyper!

A few Northern Waterthushes winter in area wetlands, particularly in the mangroves.  This one was at Sheepshead.

This seems to be a good year for Hermit Thrushes.

A Wood Thrush has also been hanging around the Convention Center for the past week.

This Rose-breasted Grosbeak is a lttle bit late.  A few usually winter in the Valley.

I drove out on the mudflats to get a better look at the shorebirds, gulls and terns.  This gull had me going for a while.  It was just a little bigger than the Laughing Gulls and very boldly marked.  The bill seemed too large for a Mew Gull and the bird seemed too small for a California so I knew it had to be a Ring-billed Gull. Turns out to be a juvenile plumage that I've never noticed before down here.  It was a good learning experience.

Franklin's Gulls are still passing through.  I used to think it ws difficult to separate them from Laughing Gulls in winter plumage.  Seems pretty easy now.

There were lots of shorebirds on the flats but with the cloudy conditions my photos are not too great so we're going to skip them.  Back at Sheepshead I got a glimpse of a distant Tennessee Warbler.  They often have faint wing bars that can confuse even experienced birders.

List from the Convention Center

Mottled Duck  10
Blue-winged Teal  4
Northern Pintail 10
Redhead  10
Pied-billed Grebe  1
Double-crested Cormorant  3
American
White Pelican  50
Brown Pelican  60
Little Blue Heron  1
Tricolored Heron 1
Reddish Egret  1
Roseate Spoonbill  8
Osprey  1
Common Gallinule 1
Black-necked Stilt  6
Black-bellied Plover  10
Snowy Plover 3
Semipalmated Plover  7
Piping Plover  27
Willet (Western)  15
Marbled
Godwit  9
Ruddy Turnstone  15
Sanderling  20
Dunlin  100
Least Sandpiper 3
Western Sandpiper  30
Short-billed Dowitcher  12
Laughing Gull 400
Franklin's Gull  100
Ring-billed Gull  3
Herring Gull (American)  1
Caspian Tern  20
Forster's Tern 20
Royal Tern  150
Sandwich Tern  15
Black Skimmer  6
Eurasian Collared-Dove 10
White-winged Dove  1
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker  1
Eastern Phoebe 1
White-eyed Vireo  1
Blue-headed Vireo  1
Ruby-crowned Kinglet  2
Hermit
Thrush  1
Wood Thrush  1
Gray Catbird  10
Long-billed Thrasher  1
Northern
Mockingbird  1
Orange-crowned Warbler  1
Common Yellowthroat  1
American
Redstart  1
Magnolia Warbler  1
Yellow-rumped Warbler (Audubon's) 2
Black-throated Green Warbler  3
Wilson's Warbler  1
Northern Cardinal 1
Rose-breasted Grosbeak  1
Indigo Bunting  8
Red-winged Blackbird 20
Great-tailed Grackle  2

Good Stuff in the RGV, 11/10/15

The RGV Birding Festival ended a couple of days ago and the field trips really turned up a lot of unusual birds across the Rio Grande Valley.  This Greater Pewee was found a couple of days before the Festival at Anzalduas County Park and was a real hit.  It's the third I've seen in the Valley.  Also seen during the Festival at Anzalduas were Hooked-billed Kites, Zone-tailed Hawk and Dusky-capped Flycatcher.  I may try for the kites tomorrow.

A Blue-throated Hummingbird was found in the parking lot at Estero Llano Grande State Park.  The field trip I co-led with Jon Dunn got to see it .  Later in the Tropical Zone Jon was pointing out birds to the group and I saw a flash of rufous, brown and yellow.  I shouted out "Myiarchus!"  The bird perched in front of us and Jon made the call "Dusky-capped Flycatcher" before I could get the words out.  Unfortunately I wasn't carrying my camera.

The next day a Whooping Crane was found with a flock of Sandhills near Laguna Atascosa NWR.  I raced over after my field trip and managed the poorest of photos from a quarter mile or more away.  It was the first I have seen in the Valley.

Huck Hutchens and I lead a couple of trips up to Brushline Road and Sal del Rey where we found a single Red-necked Phalarope with fifteen Wilson's Phalaropes.  Two Say's Phoebes were later seen at Hargill but the Collared Plover seems gone for the year.  Again no photos.  

At the same time the group at Sabal Palm Sanctuary had a singing "Western" type flycatcher which from the spectrograph of the song seems to be the first Texas record of Pacific-slope Flycatcher.  The old Western Flycatcher was split in 1989 into the Cordilleran Flycatcher of the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific-slope Flycatcher of the West Coast based on differences in their songs.  I ran over there this morning and with David Benn's help got to see it.  What a cooperative bird!  I found one nearly twenty years ago south of Santa Maria that was probably this species.

So the cavalcade (I like that word) of rarities continues.  What's next?