Community birding at its finest

Winter weather advisory.  A perfect time to go to the Texas City Dike and look for rare gulls and other seabirds. Temperatures were below freezing and dropping, wind was blowing so hard all of the porta potties had been blown over, and it was drizzling turning to sleet and wet snow.  Work was cancelled so I headed to the dike.  It was a pretty slow day bird wise as most of the smarter birds were hunkered down somewhere. I got to the end of the dike ready to head back and call it quits when I ran into Dennis Shepler who saw a Parasitic Yaeger the day before.  We've met many times while birding so we thought it would be a good idea to exchange phone numbers in case one of us saw a good bird we could contact each other.

That good idea turned out to be a great idea!

I went back to my house to eat some lunch and watch some winter weather related news. The roads were starting to get icy as temperatures continued to fall so I figured my day was pretty much over.  Then...I get a call from Dennis.  He told me Richard Liebler found a Little Gull at the dike, Very rare.  So I slipped my boots back on and hauled booty back to the dike in very light traffic due to the deteriorating weather. Got there in record time. While trying to locate Dennis on the 5 mile long dike I called my other birding bud Dennis Cooke, and he was on his way.  I found Dennis S. and James Rieman trying to relocate the bird and we thought it would be a good idea if we split up a bit to cover more ground. Pretty quickly, Dennis S found the bird so I raced to his location and just missed it. We did this routine again  he eventually got me on it for Texas Life Bird 408.
A few minutes later Dennis Cooke showed up and he got on the bird in no time.  Dennis, who left home so fast he was still wearing his house slippers, joined me in my truck for quite some time as we moved around a little bit trying to stay on this bird and get some good pictures in pretty poor lighting conditions. James left and we thought we had sufficient photos so I figured I would take him back to his car so we call it a day, it was already after 4:00. But before I could put the truck in drive Dennis noticed a dark bird flying our way. Parasitic Yaeger! I pulled my camera out trying to get a quick shot of this fast moving bird.  He was not interested in stopping so the chase was on.  I was going over 40 mph trying to keep up with it (the speed limit on the dike is 25) meanwhile Dennis was trying to call James to tell him about the jaeger that was headed in his direction.  James got on it and we caught back up with it for Texas Life Bird 409.
Not the greatest pictures but I headed home satisfied, and not a moment too soon.  Really icy roads at this point and bridges and overpasses were being closed .  I did hit a couple ice spots that made my heart skip a beat but made it home safely.

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