Tuesday, March 20, 2001

Visiting western tanagers puzzle their Oso-area hosts

It takes some detective work to identify the rare winged guests seen a few times each decade

Pat and Holland Mundy live in one of the best habitat neighborhoods in town, Edgewater Terrace. Here, instead of scraping the lots and planting nursery plants, developers left some native ebony trees and their understory. This subdivision lies between Ocean Drive, Ennis Joslin and Alameda, near the Oso. Most of the houses were built in the fifties. Pat called recently to tell of an interesting bird, wondering if I could identify it. Actually it was three birds and they were eating bees. I needed to see this.
   She had said her yard was a jungle and this was true. Large, old hackberry trees stuck their heads up above Chinese tallow and mesquite. A huge Norfolk pine looked down from one corner.
   Pat is an artist, a painter, and her husband is a retired geologist. She said they met in the first grade in Springfield, Mo. Between them they have filled the house with their hobbies and toys. Everywhere there is something interesting to see. Pat paints with watercolor. You may have seen her long skylines of Corpus Christi for sale at the Corpus Christi Art Foundation.
   She took me to a window that looked out through an iron grate on a double wooden wall of the house. This was the beehive. The little golden insects were moving in and out through a narrow crack. She described first noticing a bird sitting on the grate, intently watching the bees. It was greenish with a heavy bill. It darted out and grabbed a bee. Pat, watching inside the window, could distinctly hear it chomp four times on the prey. We looked at pictures in the field guide. She thought it resembled a female bunting, an oriole, or possibly a tanager. She and Holland thought they had seen three of these birds. When the temperature dropped with the arrival of a norther, the birds left. I wished I could have seen them.
   A second chance
   Then this week I had a call from Erwin Becker and his wife, Betty, who live in the same neighborhood, about a block from the Mundys. They have a very birdy yard also and are enthusiastic birders. An interesting bird was coming to their feeder. Betty, who does the research, felt that it had to be a western tanager. I had already started this column and was working on it when Erwin called. Taking my camera in hand, I went.
   Soon I was seated in the feeder viewing area in their back yard, waiting. It had been there five minutes earlier they told me, in fact, they thought there might be two or three of them. Sparrows and red-winged blackbirds were gobbling seed. Mourning doves were eating the seed on the ground. As I waited, a kiskadee flycatcher flew in with a piercing call. After about five minutes, one of the target birds came. I had done my homework and knew that the wingbars were the identifying mark to look for. Sure enough, the greenish bird had two strong wingbars. "Try to see if the top one is yellow and the bottom one white,'' I said to Betty who had some nice new binoculars of the fancy, hand steadying type. She thought the top wingbar was yellow.
   Rare tanager sighting
   I was able to see that the head of the bird was partly red and there was some red on its throat. This is the strange mottled appearance of a bird taking on summer plumage. It appeared to me that this bird would soon have the coloring of a male adult western tanager. Blacklock and Rappole's "Birds of the Texas Coastal Bend, Abundance and Distribution'' speaks of the western tanager's abundance as rare or casual, with a few sightings per decade, in spring and fall.
   This is the neighborhood where Bob and Karen Benson found a mangrove cuckoo in their yard last summer. Bob came but had not yet seen the tanagers, but Karen identified them as western tanagers. I wanted the Mundys to see the birds. I think they may have been the bee eaters.
  

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

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