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Tuesday, September 19, 2000

Bird-watching group makes delightful discoveries at Big Bend National Park
Alert roadrunner, foraging tanager and curious jays are some trip's key sights

Last week, Gene Blacklock led a birding group on a quick, four-day escape to Big Bend National Park. My memories of it are like an automatically changing slide show filled with far, empty vistas, breathless vigils and intimate looks at birds recalled fondly from other years.
   We stopped beneath an overpass somewhere on Interstate 10, out of Ozona. There was a row of stubby trees. Each cast a small circle of shade, like a skirt, around the base of its trunk.
   The trees proved to be of an unusual species, Bois D'Arc or Osage Orange. I know of only two of this kind growing in Corpus Christi. They are very old and are in the front yard of the Blucherville offices of the Junior League across the street from Blucher Park.
   Every one of those little trees in East Texas was laden with a chartreuse, softball-size, lumpy fruit. In the shade of one, alertly examining our group, was a greater roadrunner.
   Memorable discoveries
   The group stayed at Lajitas, a resuscitated ghost community just outside the westernmost tip of Big Bend National Park. The regimen was early to rise and late to retire. Planned for the first morning was a hike to the lowest point at which a Colima warbler had been seen in fall. The Colima warbler is one of the birds for which the park is famous. It is a Mexican species. Fortunately, I had been there, done that, but could not have hiked that steep trail anyway.
   Before the climbers took off, we walked up the road toward the stone cottages in the Basin, a large, bowl-shaped valley in the heart of the Chisos Mountains, at about 5,500 feet of elevation. Skittering a few yards in front of us were some small, gray-brown birds, canyon towhees. This species was formerly considered to be the same as the California towhee. Evelyn Atkinson, from Rockport, made a nice discovery in a tree over the gulch, a western tanager. It was foraging with several other birds including an hepatic tanager.
   Curious jays
   Calling in raucous voices from every side were gray-breasted jays. Species of jays, much like towhees, are being regrouped by ornithologists, and I think gray-breasted jays are now called Mexican jays. These long-tailed birds are soft blue above with a brownish patch in the center of their grayish backs. They lack a crest and do not have white throats or white eyebrows as do the scrub jays. Curiosity is their middle name, so the troop surrounding us worked its way ever closer until each member had been able to sneak a look at us.
   Left to my own devices, I spent a few nostalgic minutes looking at the old stone cottages where I had stayed during earlier Big Bend trips, once with my family, later with Kay McCracken and Doris McGuire, and another time with Carol Kilgore. The broad shady porches beckoned but I turned my back and went to walk an easy trail, the Window View, which looks through its frame of mountains to an expanse of desert plain below.
   Baby barn swallows
   At the Visitor's Center, I played with a machine that showed bright pictures of birds I might see and, if I pushed the correct button, played tapes of their chirp notes and songs. Under the eaves at this building, we found nests of barn swallows complete with yellow gaping baby birds. Nancy Devlin got a good picture of them.
   The trip was sponsored by the Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Programs, Inc. and by area birding clubs. Participants in the trip were: Carlene and Willard Johnson, Patti McMillan, Nancy Devlin, Margie Di Clemente and J.R. Garza of Corpus Christi; and Evelyn Atkinson, Bron Rorex, and Shirley and Everett MCaughey of Rockport.
   More next week about Big Bend.


The Coastal Bend Sierra Club will meet today, 11:15 a.m. for lunch, 12:15 p.m. for meeting, at the Art Community Center, 100 Shoreline Blvd. Everyone is welcome to come. A program will cover Commercial Logging on Our Public Lands.

The Corpus Christi Hawk Watch is going on daily at Hazel Bazemore County Park. The hill is manned with experienced watchers from dawn until about 5 p.m.


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

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