Fast and Furious

Greetings from Galveston!

Actually, we're not in Galveston. But from here, we can hear her seawinds blowing and see her seabirds flying in the sun. We're just a little north, on the Bolivar Peninsula, which is close enough for horseshoes and birding, I say.

Today was another marathon in a string of 26.2's. We rose at 5:30am, were on the road by 6am, and didn't relax until dinner at 8pm. In between those times, we battled rain, another series of thunderstorms, 120 miles of freeway through the middle of Houston, more rain, ravenous and dastardly mosquitoes, and there may have been a new bird... or twenty.

That's right, we picked up *twenty* new birds today, woohoo!

The first few birds came on a visit to the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge, where we took a tour to see the eponymous fowl do its version of the Chicken Dance.

FYI, the Attwater's is possibly the rarest bird in North America. The refuge estimates that in 1900 there were around 1 million individuals, and now maybe 100 or so remain in the wild, which actually is double the population from 10 years ago. Turns out that we value prairie more as tract homes and strip malls than we do as habitat. Oh, and bringing fire ants to America, which consume all the insects that the baby chicks eat as well as the chicks themselves, probably wasn't the best of ideas. And frankly, the male birds themselves are pretty dumb... they insist on doing their mating dances in the middle of open spaces, so they're easy targets for hawks.

After that ecology lesson, we relocated about 120 miles east to our current campsite, passing such fine businesses as Daquiris To Geaux and Darque Tan ("the finest chain of luxury tanning salons in the world") as well as an inordinate number of gentlemen's clubs and churches, often not that far from each other. Texas!!!

Around 4:00pm, having checked in and dropped our trailer, we headed north to the famous High Island, one of the richest birding areas during spring migration, for a little evening excursion. The area is just a few inches higher than the surrounding land, which makes the difference between supporting only small shrubs vs. huge trees. Birds flying up the coast see that oasis of oaks and dive in for a respite, which concentrates them in a fairly small area.

Today, after the recent storms, there were a ton of birds and probably 100x the mosquitoes. Despite long-sleeve jackets, long pants, boots, and a DEET bath, at times we held out binoculars with one hand, while slapping pests with the other.  Yet in one stretch, we averaged finding more than one new bird species per minute!

With all that, our tally has jumped to 424, which crushes our prior personal best of 406. Not bad for a couple of amateurs...

For the next few days, we're going to hang in this area and see what the weather does. As of now, thunderstorms are supposed to rumble around through Saturday, so we'll see what that does to the migration itinerary.

Until next time,
Me