Brianbirdbrain

It was a lot of work but I managed to maintain a fairly consistent blog page for 2018.  Awesome adventures, great birds, fantastic friends and meeting new ones along the way.  Looking back on it, I had a very blessed year both personally and more importantly for this blog, BIRDING.  It was quite a challenge to come up with a proper blog title that would sum up the year while giving it the justice it deserves so I settled it on the chickens.  Why?  I got many rarer birds than those, and besides, prairie chickens aren't that difficult, are they?  In  two separate posts, Undercover Birding and Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road , I wrote about the obstacles these birds face and the challenge of finding them.  The Greater Prairie-Chicken and the Lesser Prairie-Chicken both are birds that require an intentional trip to go see them. You will almost definitely not just happen to randomly see them while looking for something else, so I figure unless I...

Feeling like we had a successful morning seeing the Roadside Hawk , and getting some epic shots, we had to decide how to spend the day.  Our original plan was to see the hawk, then bird up the Rio Grande a little ways, then head back to Bobs house in Palacios, and then I would drive back to my house getting home around 10:00 pm Sunday night.  But with our Jeep dilemma giving us an extra day in the valley we could take our time birding and end up wherever we ended up and still make it back to Mission to get the truck by 3:00 or 4:00 (hopefully not later) and race home. Sorting through our options, Bob came up with a few good scenarios and asked me what I wanted to do.  Of course my reply was "I don't know, whatever you want to do".   He was pretty close to 200 birds for Hidalgo County and almost at 100 in Starr County and there were about four birds we thought I could add to my life list.  So we headed up the valley picking a few new ones in Hidalgo and worked...

Two weeks ago my good friend Bob invited me to go down to south Texas to look for a rare hawk that popped up along the border a week or so prior.  The problem was that we had another friend who wanted to leave out Thursday afternoon to make sure they got there before the hawk took off back to Mexico.  Rare birds do not always cooperate as I well know missing a few by just a couple of hours.  I was thankful for the invite but work issues kept me home and I figured I would just have to pass on the bird. Well, Bob and John were successful in locating the bird and pulled off a few decent pictures as well so that is where the story ends. Or so I thought.  The next weekend Bob offered to drive me down to the valley to see the hawk for myself.  What a great friend, I definitely did not want to pass on such an offer so I made plans to drive from League City at 4:00am to his house in Palacios then leave around 6:00 birding our way down to the valley and try for the h...

Once again I woke up Saturday morning with no intentions of driving 4 hours to see a bird, but I got the itch, and I was off to Port Aransas to look for a Western Gull that had been found earlier in the week.  This specie has been seen in the state only 3 other times and after a four hour drive and a ferry ride I arrived at my destination to find out I was about an hour late.  No problem, I figured the gull would return to its favorite spot at some point in the day.  Five hours later, it did not disappoint, for Texas Life Bird 432 Western Gull. I couldn't help but have that Pet Shop Boys song stuck in my head West End Girls.   And the five hour wait one the beach was not a complete waste of time.  I met some great birders and made some new friends, and as an added bonus I broke the century mark for Nueces county giving me 103 species for that county.  

We had plans for Saturday morning to take a day trip down the coast to see my in-laws but that trip got canceled at the last minute so I woke up with the usual question in my head... What am I going to do today?  I normally decide where to go birding on Saturday mornings when I wake up on Saturday morning.  This Saturday was no different, but I did wake up a little to late to try to go too far.  The Armand Bayou monthly bird count starts at 7:00am but I was a little late to try and make that one.  I could just go somewhere local but then I would be back at the house too early and have to figure out how to fill the rest of the day.  October is one of my least favorite months to bird for a few reasons.  Most of the summer birds are gone, the bulk of the migrants have passed already and now we just have to wait patiently for the winter arrivals.  So with all that stacked up against me and getting a little unmotivated I jokingly made the suggestion to driv...

Why was the chicken on the road to begin with?  The answer to that question is... well, it doesn't really matter to me.  I am just glad it was in the road because once they get off the road into the grass they disappear quick.  I'm talking about the Greater Prairie-Chicken, which is actually a grouse I suppose, and more precisely the Attwater's population.  They've been on the edge of extinction plenty of times and now live in the wild in only a couple places and are being captive bred at a few zoos.  Most of the prairie that God designed for them to live on is now gone, and because they nest on the ground fire ants are a big problem as well, and they are big delicious birds enjoyed by all predators.  Hurricane Harvey didn't help matters either. 29 hens were being tracked with radio collars before the storm and after the storm they could only confirm 5 survived, and the official count this spring documented only 26 of these birds were left in the wild....