Tuesday, July 10, 2001

Proposed bomb site ruffles birders

All this talk lately about the proposed bombing range in Kenedy County has gotten the birding community talking as well.
   Those of us who have often birded that area think of the rare woodpeckers, the pair of red-naped sapsuckers, that spent a winter in Sarita.
   We once dedicated a special field trip to seeing them. "And do you remember the day we saw the great-horned owl with its babies in the top of the dead palm tree behind the Kenedy Ranch office right in town?" asked my birder friend.
   Sure I did, I wrote a column about it. The brush below the tree was a regular bird apartment building. Besides a northern mocking bird, there were a pair of cardinals, Lincoln sparrows and a beautiful male hooded oriole.
   A country treat
   Also seen in the surrounding country that day were scissor-tailed flycatchers, and a great kiskadee flycatcher, also a loggerhead shrike. Then there was the rufous-backed robin, up from Mexico, that stopped in Sarita long enough to be found by visitors who were on their way to the Valley after attending an American Birding Association meeting in Corpus Christi.
   The place was alive with other birds that day. In the pond least grebes with babies were a thrilling addition to some yankee birders' lists.
   Black-crowned night herons by a pond, and a Baltimore oriole were on the list that day.
   A snipe, dazzled the eyes of winter-weary birders, and eastern bluebirds, posed on barbed wire between sallies. The column I wrote about that February bird mentioned another crowd pleaser, a Cape May warbler.
   I spoke of a blooming, deep purple phacelia, and a stand of dark orange Indian paint brush.
   "Purple martins will be here before you can say 'spring house cleaning,' " I said.
   Another encounter
   On another trip to Sarita, we entered the road across on the other side of the highway from the entrance. It goes to the Kenedy Ranch.
   I had written in my column: "There we found a caracara, (a large meat-eating bird that mostly dines on carrion) feeding on some luckless, deceased small animal. A Cooper's hawk perched in a bare thorn tree overlooking a pond. Many eastern meadow-larks showed us their white-black-white tails, and one favored us with the sweet song of his tribe.
   The finale was one of the best sights: a flock of wild turkeys, grazing beside the road, fled with a flourish over the fence."
   With wonderful birding memories like these, it would be a shame to see that area endangered by a bombing range.
  
  

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

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