Birdwatching with Phyllis Yochem
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Tuesday, December 28, 1999

Mild, windless weather perfect for start of Christmas bird count

Many South Texas specials seen in Corpus Christi count: kiskadees, green jays and pauraques

 

The first two days of the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Counts, which will last until Jan. 3, were blessed with good weather.
   The wind came up in the afternoon of the Corpus Christi Count on Dec. 18. Jim Hailey and I, working in Hazel Bazemore Park, were given a difficult goal: we were to find several unusual birds previously seen there by the Brittain brothers, Rick and Chuck. They saw a western tanager, an ovenbird and a lazuli bunting. We did not find them.
   We did find many of the South Texas specials that add glamour to the list. We got several great kiskadees, a vermilion flycatcher, green jays and before dawn, pauraques. A Bullock's oriole, a male in good plumage, was a surprise sighting.
   Woodpeckers are also here this winter. Besides golden-fronted woodpeckers, we saw ladder-backed woodpeckers and yellow-bellied sapsuckers. We routed a perfectly camouflaged family of common snipe just where they were last year - ranged along a drainage ditch in a residential area. An early estimate of the species seen was 206.
   The weather for Flour Bluff the next day was picture perfect - mild and windless. My team included Virginia Dunham, Leonabelle Turnbull and Betty Harless, a winter Texan from Indianapolis. Our area is Laguna Shores to Waldron Road between Yorktown and Padre Island Drive.
   There we count the exciting drove of shore birds that fish along the edges of the Laguna Madre - the dunlins, dowitchers, least and western sandpipers, egrets and herons. We usually find little blue herons in shallow blue pools and we census ponds and potholes where ducks winter. In between, we coax ruby-crowned kinglets, orange-crowned warblers and dazzling scarlet male cardinals out of the chaparral. We played taped screech owl calls along the verges of impassible thickets to lure a lurking catbird or skulking hermit thrush into view.
   I have no results yet on the Flour Bluff Count, but they should be excellent.
   I drove to Aransas Pass in a cold drizzly predawn on Dec. 20 to join another familiar pair, Leonabelle Turner and Jimmy Swartz, to census a territory we have done many times before as our part of the Port Aransas Bird Count.
   We were afraid we didn't have a chance of finding most of the birds we have grown to expect, but despite the weather, we found a good number of species.
   Conn Brown Harbor had been restored to out territory after a few years of being assigned to someone else's, so we tried our luck there first, counting the many laughing gulls, pigeons, great-tailed grackles and cormorants. There were the expected kinglets, cardinals, orange-crowned warblers and chipping sparrows, but no blue-gray gnatcatchers.
   The birds did retire early as they always do when the weather is bad. Results for this count will depend on whether compilers Scott Holt and John Holt were able to do part of the count from a boat.
   It is almost over - the millennium, I mean. How fortunate we are to have lived through these times. We can only wonder what is to come. If we knew, we might not believe it.
   I wish each of you a happy new millennium. You know what I hope to be doing New Year's Day - birding, of course.
  
  

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Phyllis Yochem, a Corpus Christi resident, has studied birds of Texas since 1960.

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