Spray and Pray

Buenas noches, mis lindos pequeños bandidos,

McAllen, TX is a hot, steamy conglomeration of shopping malls in an otherwise hot, steamy but low-budget area. It's the largest city in south Texas, and has become a mecca of retail therapy for both Texan Fashionistas and well-heeled Mexicans. Now go forth, and consider yourself informed.

We happen to be in McAllen (again) because certain birds love this climate. Wild guess, but I assume they aren't here for the Saks-Off-Fifth or Cavender's Boot City...a better guess would be the plethora of bugs, dense brushy cover, and aforementioned hot-n-steamy weather. All of which explain why we'll be getting out of here soon!

Our recent birding adventures have continued to turn up one new bird after another, albeit at a slower pace than before. This is causing us to try new techniques, at which the Birding Purist (and you know who you are!) may cringe.

I have dubbed my favorite technique, "Spray and Pray" (which is ironically appropriate given the evangelical bent of the region). In this technique, the brave/lazy birder aims their camera at a possible target, blasts a bunch of pictures, and then reviews the pictures later to see what they hit.

Does this technique work? Believe it or not, sometimes, your prayers do get answered.

Exhibit #1:

What chu lookin at, Willis?  (betting nobody under 40 gets that reference...)

Now, we knew that we had a number of Green Parakeets, which have entirely green bodies. We didn't know until we reviewed the picture, however, that they had been joined by a Red-Crowned Parrot (you may need to zoom the pic to see that the middle bird, staring at the camera, has a red forehead).

Note also that some of the pictures we took that night highlight one of the major cultural problems sweeping America today: Public make-out sessions by Parrots. In this particular place, there were probably 500 parrots lined up on the electrical wires, most of them in pairs. And, most of them were shamelessly snuggling and kissing, like this set in the middle:

Get a room!

I could not tell you what the upper-left parrot is doing. But I digress.

Exhibit #2:

One of the tricks-of-the-trade for raptor identification is to look at the silhouette of the bird. Since details of feather color can be hard to see from 1000-2000 feet away, other clues like the shape of the wings and length of the tail are needed.

In this case, we believe the bottom bird is a rare Hook-billed Kite, based on the very round, paddle-shaped wings, [4/24 update -- it's not :-(  An expert said that it was a Broad-winged Hawk missing his tail feathers] (He's joined by 3 Broad-winged Hawks and probably 1 Mississippi Kite a Sharp-shinned Hawk, if you care. Which I know you do.) There are fewer than 50 breeding pairs of these birds in the US, and all of them are located within 20 miles of McAllen. None had been reported recently, so we didn't even think we would see one. And, this was literally a random blast of the sky. We're waiting to hear back from the local record-keepers to confirm our guess, so hopefully I won't have to edit this blog post in a few days! [4/24 update -- I'm editing :-( ]

Now, you can question the validity of counting this bird, since we didn't know we'd seen it at the time. However, we did see the sky with the bird in it at the time the bird was there, and we did ID it from the photo, so to our ethics, this counts. If you don't think we should count it, then just track your own damn list, and keep your hands off our rights to bear 400mm lenses!

Stay frosty,
Me