Tuesday, February 27, 2001

Bird guides lead productive trip to Guadalupe Delta

Michael Marsden, born in England, has practiced law for 25 years. On the Cayman Islands, where he was Solicitor General, he met Donna Knox, a secretary for the accounting firm of Peat Marwick. They threw over the sedate life, married and moved to Rockport. They now guide birders, and run Cayman House, a Bed and Breakfast, in Fulton. They have hosted a rare-for-this-area bird, a downy woodpecker, on their patio this winter.
   Michael recently led an Audubon Outdoor Club field trip to the Guadalupe Delta. The group met in Tivoli (pronounced Tie-vol'-uh).
   This town is known by local birders for harboring, on a nearby ranch, a pair of nesting bald eagles. Active for many years, the nest tree was damaged in a storm and the birds have found a new location.
   Permission required
   Tivoli has other birds of interest to birders. The first sighted from the parking lot where we gathered was a Brewer's black bird, a dove shaped black bird with purplish head and yellow eyes.
   Not unexpectedly in the same flock were common grackles, smaller and rounder than our back home great-tailed grackles. A Carolina wren sang from trees where yellow-rumped warblers fed.
   Marsden took us to the Texas Park and Wildlife's Guadalupe Delta Wildlife Management Area. Permission is required to enter this fresh-water marsh. We were able to drive along the Guadalupe River where older birders remember seeing pileated woodpeckers and golden-crowned kinglets in other years. Fragrant, lavendar forest violets grow there, and tiny mushrooms spring from clumps of cow manure.
   Birding spots
   This area is also the east/west dividing line between such species as red-bellied and golden-fronted woodpeckers, and brown and long-billed thrashers.
   We saw several big, black American crows for which this delta is the southern limit of their range.
   I thought I knew all the birding spots around but was introduced to a new one, Austwell Rotary Park, where we ate our picnic lunch.
   The small park has a selective bird clientele. Along one side are open fields and the other overlooks a draw with large trees. It is easy to find by following Austwell Road from Highway 35 around a corner, about 3 blocks.
   The first rough-winged swallows of the year dipped low over the fields as Marsden led us to another section of the delta which he said had been closed to all visitors for several years because of research being done there. We walked onto a boardwalk that overlooked the marsh. There were many ducks, mostly northern shovelers and teal. Among them, Marsden pointed out a lesser and a greater yellowlegs wading. In a brushy thicket not far from the road were cedar waxings, the largest flock I had seen this winter. This is a species that, like American robins, is abundant some winters and almost absent others.
   Titmice and chickadees were in the wood, and pine warblers, a species for which this has also been a good winter.
   The beautiful day, almost too cold for comfort in the morning, turned to sunny spring afternoon.
   As we came onto the road from the refuge, the gatepost was decorated with a light hawk. It allowed us to come close and examine it carefully. Marsden decided it was an immature Cooper's hawk.
  

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

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