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Birdwatching
with Phyllis Yochem
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Tuesday, December 5, 2000
South Texas birders are craning their necks to see winter favorites
This is the time of year we wait for. Cool, pleasant days followed by cool, starry nights.The air is so clear, you can see the opposite shore of the bay. Not every day is perfect, but some are. Along with Winter Texans, we expect a flurry of other visitors from the north. Out of the fields of dry grass jump "little brown jobs,'' winter sparrows. A few south-bound warblers can still be found, scouring the trees for insects.
Caroling cranes
We enjoyed one of my favorite seasonal sights this week as we drove to Kingsville in late evening. While we hurried through endless empty black fields, out Chapman Ranch Road, the sky overhead began to be populated by flocks of large, dark birds, traveling deliberately in loose formations. In the daytime there had already been an earlier flock of sandhill cranes this year, but cranes are especially impressive as they come at dusk, crossing low above fields and the highway, looking for a place to spend the night.
My daughter rolled down her window to listen for the yodeling cry we knew they were making. Their call, described as Edgar Kincaid as sonorous, somewhat rattling gurroo, or garoo-oo-oo,'' is produced through a coiled windpipe, shaped like a French horn.
I felt sure I had seen these same flocks in other years. They seemed to know where they were headed. I remember a sunset hour when we were in a nearby field looking for mountain plover, which also come about this time of year. In the distance we heard them on the still air, then saw the big cranes landing.
Sandhill or whooping?
Sandhill cranes are large, long legged, long necked, with a wingspread of 6-7 feet, and colored mostly gray. Adults have yellow eyes and a bald patch of red skin on their forehead. Sexes look alike but females are slightly smaller. They fly with neck and legs extended and, when traveling long distance, at a great altitude.
Their diet at this time of year consists of many kinds of nuts, seeds, wild onion tubers, and mice, frogs and crayfish.
Sandhills are slightly smaller cousins of our famous whooping cranes that winter up the coast to the north, at Aransas Wildlife Refuge. They are not rare; in fact they may even be hunted legally. There are many races, which vary slightly in size and habit. The new Sibley Field Guide separates them into two races: greater and lesser, and says that the former is the southern race and is therefore what comes to South Texas.
They do not breed locally but migrate in late March or early April to their northern, summer grounds. Their mating displays are said to be spectacular and often communal.
The public is invited to attend a talk by Dr. Geoff Holroyd at 7 p.m. tonight at the Botanical Gardens. Dr. Holroyd is Burrowing Owl specialist for the Canadian Wildlife Service. He will explain an international cooperative effort, of which he is director, to document the lives of burrowing owls. This animal is endangered in Canada and winters in this area.
Phyllis Yochem, a Corpus Christi
resident, has studied birds of Texas since 1960.
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