From Port Arthur to Anahuac NWR

   What a wonderful day. We bundled against the cold and the wind and birded the marshes along the coast between Louisiana and Texas. I got a little dehydrated, getting blown by the wind in the cold, but we had a terrific time. This has been an amazing vacation so far. We observed three more "life birds", filling in a lot of the blanks from our first trip down the Texas Coastal Birding Trail five years ago.

   Our first new bird was the White Tailed Kite (Elanus leucurus). It was a bird we almost missed. We almost did not go down that road because of a smoldering fire in the underbrush. And that road was a dead end. When Berry first saw it, she thought it was a gull. There were two of them perched on a wire next to the road. The hooked bill and the characteristic feather pattern are diagnostic.

White Tailed Kite

   The second surprise was the Lesser Snow Goose (Chen caerulescens caerulescens). There was a large flock of them in a canal and an adjacent field, but right in front of them were a couple of the cutest red-beaked blue-eyed White Ibis' that you'd ever see, sunning themselves next to our car. We could not get our scope off them. It was only after we took the time to photograph and scope the White Ibis' exhaustively that we finally got around to wondering about the purple tinged morph of the Snow Goose.

Lesser Snow Goose

   The pair of Mottled Ducks we saw were the third "life birds" for today. They are identified by the color of the bill. The male has a sharp yellow bill; the female has an olive bill which makes her less obtrusive. The male and female were together when we saw them, making identification easy. We were interrupted here by a huge truck passing by our rental car and several Cormorants diving in the canal next to them.

Mottled Duck

  

• Brown Pelican
  
• American White
  
• Red Winged Blackbird
  
• American Robin
  
• Eastern Screech Owl
  
• Boat Tailed Grackle
  
• Killdeer
  
• Broad Winged Hawk
  
• Willett
  
• Great Egret
  
• Red Shouldered Hawk
  
• Great Blue Heron
  
• White Tailed Kite
  
• Osprey
  
• American Kestrel
  
• Belted Kingfisher
  
• Herring Gull
  
• Royal Tern
  
• Common Grackle
  
• Semi-Palmated Sandpiper
  
• Sanderling
  
• Ring Billed Gull
  
• Laughing Gull
  
• White Ibis with juveniles
  
• Northern Harrier
  
• Red Tailed Hawk
  
• Eastern Phoebe
  
• Turkey Vulture
  
• Western Meadowlark
  
• Snowy Egret
  
• Double Crested Cormorant
  
• Greater Yellowlegs
  
• Pied Billed Grebe
  
• Lesser Scaup
  
• American Coot
  
• Ruddy Turnstone
  
• Ground Dove
  
• Mottled Duck
  
• Killdeer
  
• Lesser Snow Goose
  

  

Robert

photo courtesy of rwolf, jpippen, rhamaguchi