March Bird Count at Armand Bayou

The second Saturday of every month Armand Bayou does a bird count/census and when I want to stay local I sometimes help on that count.  It provides a good opportunity to meet other birders in the area and also catch up with the ones I already know.  Today I birded with Andrew Hamlett who compiles for the monthly count and the Christmas Bird Count.  He informed me that we ended up with 149 species on the Christmas Bird Count which is around the average but a mere 1 bird from making the cut on the 150+ species ranking list.  The birds we saw throughout the morning were the expected ones.  This time of year can be a bit slow since many of the winter residents have moved on and we saw only a few summer residents that have arrived to replace them like Northern Parulas,  Yellow-crowned Night Herons, and Purple Martins.  So many birds we count are by hearing them only and that got us talking about our hearing range.  You can check yours out at:https://www.allaboutbirds.org/do-bird-songs-have-frequencies-higher-than-humans-can-hear/

  So it is time to start planning for many birders favorite time of year, SPRING MIGRATION !


I wanted to see which birds are not on my life list that I could target this spring in the Galveston County area so I looked at an ebird checklist for mid April for my area and these are the birds I don't have.

  1. Surf Scoter, a duck that is possible but most have already moved on
  2. Pacific Loon, another water bird that could still be around but most have gone
  3. Ferruginous Hawk, possible on a hawk watch if I wanted to go to Smith Point
  4. Hudsonian Godwit, a shorebird that migrates up the coastal plain in the spring
  5. Short-eared Owl, could chase if one shows up and sticks around
  6. Eastern Whip-Poor-Will, a camouflaged night bird that I would have to trip over while hiking
  7. Black-throated Blue Warbler, if one shows up on a Friday I could chase it on a Saturday
  8. Bobolink, a blackbird that winters in the southern hemisphere and migrates through the eastern half of Texas in the spring to their breeding grounds in the north.  Some of these birds migrate 12,000 miles every year.       
I predict with a fair amount of weekend effort I should be able to get 2 or 3 of these.  What do think?


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