Historically, Christmas time brings some of my best birding experiences.  Not only has the Christmas Bird Count experience been the source of a number of good birding days, but more importantly, it has been a great way to meet top birders of the area.  On my first year of CBCs I met and birded with Steve Gross and Howard Smith, who have been a major branch in my networking among birders, at the Cypress Creek CBC.  I also birded with the group at Hornsby Bend that year, where I got to continue my friendship with Eric Carpenter and some other top birders of Austin.  Not all experiences were positive, as I was totally clueless when I birded with Brent Ortego at theAttwater Prairie Chicken NWR in 2009, but I learned alot, and hopefully he forgets how bad of a birder I was.

  But this year, I started off with a bang.  I was asked by Ron Weeks, the leader of the San Bernard CBC, to bird with him for the day.  Ron is a renowned author about birding the Texas Coast (I own 2 of his books), as well as a topnotch  competitive birder  (Steve is one of his partners for his Big Day competitions in Texas and Idaho).  Ron and I had a good day birding the East part of the circle.  Our target birds were not exactly exciting (Black-bellied Whistling Ducks, Rock Pigeon, and House Sparrow), but our section was the only one that had a chance of finding these birds.  As we were leaving for our first stop, we ran across this Barred Owl sitting on a road sign.

  We started at a house on Fisherman’s Isle, where a nice couple put out seed and counted birds seen from their house.  Although they did not consider themselves birders, they had some knowledge that was surprising, as well as an excitement about the birds around their house that should be cultivated.  By the end of the day they had a yard list of about 42 species, including Osprey, herons, egrets, pelicans, Boat-tailed Grackels, terns, gulls, and cormourants, all seen from their living room window.

We spent the rest of the morning driving around to various stops, counting as many birds as we could find, and just seeing what effect the drought has had on the birds locally.  Highlights included anice diversity of sparrows including significantly increased numbers of Harris Sparrows, a Clay-colored Sparrow (a new bird for the CBC), and a possible LeContes Sparrow (which we didn’t count). We had a number of Sandhill Cranes fly over.  There were a larger than normal number of raptors, including a roost of 37 White-tailed Kites, which we found looking unsuccessfully for the Short-eared Owls reported by another group.  On the way back to the count, we flushed a nighthawk from the road, which is really late for the area and a new bird for the count.  In all we saw 97 species plus one unknown (the nighthawk), which seems low, and 198 species for the whole circle.

I love to bird on these CBCs, and can’t wait for the next one, in Katy, where I originally met Steve and Howard.