Inland, Dreaming of Waves

Let the serious birding begin

Sunday, April 22, 2007

I’m writing this on June 18, 2007, six weeks after I returned from my trip. This trip log is taking forever to complete.

Now is when the serious birding begins on this trip. All the family visits are over, until I see my husband on Friday. It’s nothing but birds, birds, birds, from here on out.

And driving. And not much work, given how little I’ve managed so far.

I slept in a little this morning, ate the continental breakfast, and went to the Market Basket in Winnie to stock up on some food. I took my own grocery bags into the store, as I do in Broomfield, and when I handed them to the checker, he looked at me as if I had five heads. I guess people don’t bring their own bags in Texas. And then they put the milk next to Dorothy’s birthday card, which got it damp.

I headed south on Highway 124 from Winnie and drove tentatively around High Island until I found the entrance to Boy Scout Woods. I took my scope in but soon enough decided that I didn’t need it there. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of the place—but more on that later.

Boy Scout Woods is located about a mile from the Gulf of Mexico on the Upper Texas Coast. It’s not too far from Beaumont, where my husband was born, or from Louisiana. I had originally planned to go to New Orleans on this trip and then west along the coast to High Island, but I decided to concentrate on the Texas Coast instead and go to New Orleans some other time.

This tree was planted in a yard across the street from Boy Scout Woods. It’s an Audubon sanctuary in the middle of an old subdivision. There were indigo buntings in the tree, dark blue against red, and lots of Inca doves flying around.

When I walked in the gate to Boy Scout Woods, I passed a hummingbird garden on my right and a trail on my left. Straight ahead was a kiosk and the viewing stands. I paid $5 to get a day pass for High Island bird sanctuaries and bought “A Birder’s Checklist of the Upper Texas Coast.” Then I sat down on the first level of the viewing stands. A helpful volunteer gave me a mat to sit on, observing that I probably didn’t want to get purple mulberry stains on my pants (the dreaded mulberry butt). I stared hard at the trees, hoping a bird would appear, but none did. A man and woman sitting behind me, higher up in the stands, whispered to each other about the birds they saw. “That’s a white-eyed vireo,” the woman said smugly. I surreptitiously whipped out my bird book and looked up white-eyed vireo, which I had never seen before. I even more subtly looked for the bird, moving only my eyes and tensing every muscle in my neck to keep my head still—but the stands fronted on a meadow surrounded by trees. Too many branches to scan for tiny, fast-moving birds. Still no bird in sight.

I could feel a birder’s inferiority complex coming on, so I got up and began migrating myself. For a moment I thought I might have been transported to Lothlorien as imagined by Peter Jackson and John Howe: Every path I walked on took me past a tall, skinny birder wearing a solemn, beatific expression. “A purple martin,” murmured one with a British accent, nodding toward a dark streak across the sky. “A ruby-throated hummingbird,” said another sotto voce. And all the while I kept hearing loud birdsong that everyone else seemed to be ignoring. Later I figured out that very loud bird was a northern cardinal—and I was so relieved that I hadn’t inquired about the song. How embarrassing it would have been to admit not knowing the song of a common eastern bird!

But, wait. I’m a westerner. Why do I have to recognize the song of a cardinal? Even if I do love them. Even if my mother used to feed them raisins on our patio in Kansas City. I’m always happy to see them on the rare occasions that I do, but apparently I don’t remember their song.

In between swatting at mosquitoes, which my natural bug repellant from Hawaii seemed to be attracting (it must be the kukui nut oil), and trying to figure out which path I was following on the rather cryptic map, I managed to find my way along the boardwalk to the Cathedral and sit down. Finally I was rewarded with a sighting of a scarlet tanager, another bright red bird, thanks to a woman with a very long lens who was looking for less common birds to photograph. “I’ve got hundreds [of scarlet tanagers],” she said, explaining why she wasn't bothering to take a picture. I tried to imagine being that good with a camera and an 18-inch lens. It sounded like a fine project for my retirement, but this woman was my age, if not younger.

In time, I wandered out to the slough, where there was a shaded area. I leaned against the railing and eavesdropped on conversations. There was plenty of activity there, both bird (purple gallinule and common moorhen, one chasing the other) and human (photographers, couples, friends). I dared to ask and volunteered to tell others where the birds were. I was beginning to loosen up. As I walked back I spotted a brown thrasher in a tree. It’s funny, when you bird in a new place, how you discover birds display all kinds of different behaviors. I had always thought of brown thrashers as ground birds because that’s where I’d seen them in Colorado. I guess it’s like the title of that book, Wherever You Go, There You Are. I kept bumping up against my assumptions everywhere I went.

As I was watching the thrasher, a couple came up behind me and joined in. I started talking to them and asked them about something—some bird, probably. The man laughed and said he usually birded with his brother, who knew everything, and he was just waiting for his brother to get here so he could identify all the birds for him.

For some time now, I had been trying to find Prothonotary Pond. I wandered around in the woods until I came to a turnstile, which at least was easy to find on the map but was pretty much the opposite of where I wanted to go. I found the mosquito center of the universe (a common occurrence on this trip) and finally stumbled upon the pond and sat down on a log. It was another case of birders sitting around reverently, whispering to each other (so different from Boulder Bird Club trips at Walden Ponds, where very few people bother to be quiet), and an occasional photographer standing and maneuvering gear. I saw a yellow warbler and a green heron, but no namesake warbler. I moseyed back to the kiosk, bought a T-shirt and some postcards, and rested in the Hummingbird Garden, where I watched a ladder-backed woodpecker probe the trees. And then it was on to Smith Oaks Sanctuary.

To be honest, Smith Oaks felt like a breeze, or a least a relief, after the last few hours. I parked and immediately fell in with a group of birders and photographers staring intently at an island of shrubs in the parking loop. They gossiped about sightings of painted buntings, but meanwhile they were occupied with indigo buntings, scarlet and summer tanagers, red-eyed vireos, and rose-breasted grosbeaks, three of which were new life birds for me.

But the real fun began when I reached Clay Bottom Pond. I got some good use out of my new scope at the Rookery there. The great egrets’ young had fledged, so they were fun to watch at close range, especially the ones teetering around just above the alligators. I saw anhinga for the first time, which are large black birds with white streaks on the wings, as well as neotropic cormorants. But it was the tricolored herons who put on the best show, flying in and out of their nests and displaying their white bellies, blue backs, and yellow tails. There were boat-tailed grackles there as well, and luckily for me, the Gulf Coast birds have dark eyes. I’m not sure I could have distinguished them from great-tailed grackles otherwise.

I think the riggings on Noah’s Ark must have looked like the trees on the islands on Clay Bottom Pond—covered with winged life forms.

Finally I tore myself away from Heron Island and followed the path toward the least tern colony. After walking a while on what looked like a deer trail through the woods—and wondering if alligators could make it up the bank—I gave up on the least terns and walked along Smith Pond and toward the Oak Motte. (A motte, for those who don’t know, like me, is a mound or hill. I can’t say I remember the oaks here being on a hill. Hmm.) That British birder I had seen earlier passed me, probably still seeing five times as many birds as I was, and I felt intimidated anew.

But such feelings passed as soon as I entered the woods—I had mosquitoes to occupy me. Despite the fact that I was covered from head to toe in both synthetic and natural fabrics, with only hands and face exposed, they still found a way to torture me. I discovered that my birding pants and shirt were thin enough for mosquitoes to penetrate, and they did, so often that as I stood on the path, trying to deal with three warblers flitting through the woods surrounding me, I was twitching from being bitten so often. It’d hard to focus one’s binoculars while twitching. But I was happy to see a black-and-white warbler and a female chestnut-sided warbler. The third got away too quickly, but I remember it had lots of gray on it. So write me and identify it for me, OK? The time of year and location should make it a snap.

Later on I saw a worm-eating warbler, but not the ovenbird (also having a striped head) I was hoping for. Last year there were reports of an ovenbird in Gregory Canyon, but I haven’t seen any on CO-Birds this year. So I still haven’t seen any of those striped skulkers. And there was one last birding puzzle in these woods, a thrush I finally decided must be a hermit thrush, even though I tried hard to make it into a wood thrush. The spotting on its sides seemed to belong to a wood thrush, but I just didn’t see the facial markings of the wood thrush. I guess I’m enough of a perfectionist to need more than one marking to be satisfied—though I’m sure I’ve misidentified many a bird, some of which are probably on my life list.

I was resting on a bench in the woods when a cardinal flew by. It reminded me, again, of how my mother loved them. I could imagine her being a birder—she was methodical enough. In fact, that side of her personality used to drive me crazy at times. So as I sat there, I asked her forgiveness.

By the time I made my way past the rather recently installed drip

and the “world-class oak” (I think it's the tree below, but I could be wrong--there were lots of big oaks there), I was starving. All I’d had for lunch was a banana. I went back to my truck and raided the cooler. Then I drove back to the quality establishment where I was staying and jumped in the pool. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really hot enough, in late April, to stay in the pool for very long.

I finished out the day by eating an early dinner at the cheap Chinese restaurant next door to the hotel.

posted by Price of Silence @ 11:09 AM