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...