Kansas Zoo "492"

What a great day of birding!  Several adventures on this trip could have filled a blog on their own.  During the day on Friday I was trying to figure out some plans for the weekend and since my good friend Bob Friedrichs found a Purple Sandpiper a mere 10 minutes away from my in-laws house in Jackson county it would be a hard bird to pass on.  Bob lives in the area so I always ask him to join me when I go down that way but this time he could no join me until later in the morning so I was on my own for the Purple Sandpiper search.  I arrived at the area near the causeway at 6:55 a.m. where the bird had been seen for the past week or so and it did not disappoint.  I had found Purple Sandpiper in about 10 minutes for Texas Life Bird 416.
I hung out at that location for almost an hour mainly to see who else was gonna show up looking for the bird but I was also hoping to get a better picture of the bird with the increasing daylight.  The bird never returned so I was off to the Point Comfort boat ramp to meet Bob for my next adventure.  While waiting for Bob I saw this Common Tern.  Not too rare but new Calhoun county bird for me.


Bob had invited me to go with out on his boat to Survey
American Oystercatchers in the Lavaca/ Cox Bay area.
These are Oystercatchers from a different trip but I added them in case you were wondering what one looks like 

Last year Bob surveyed the same area and found 22 Oystercatchers while this year we only managed to find a concerning 7.  Our initial theory is that these birds were affected by Hurricane Harvey in some way but we will see what the research comes up with.

While getting tossed around by the waves and 20 mph winds we came to an area on the back side of ALCOA where a greater flamingo had been seen in years past. While Bob was telling me that "this is the area we had seen the flamingo"  I was glassing the shore and bamm!  Surprise, unexpected, Greater Flamingo for Texas Life Bird 417.
This bird escaped a zoo in Kansas some 10 years ago and has been thriving in the wild ever since from Wisconsin to Louisiana and Texas and I believe some time in Mexico.  He/she had a friend a few years ago but that flamingo has not been seen in a while.  The bird is more than 20 years old and has a zoo assigned band on its leg number 492.








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