The year has started fairly slowly, with only one CBC for the new year, and things at work have not allowed me to get out at all until now, but this weekend I made an effort to get out and do some birding! Geoff asked me if I wanted to get out and do some birding on Friday, and I really wanted to do that. I had some things at work that needed to be done before I could go out, but I would get those done and then take off. That was the plan anyways… I got a call from work that necessitated me going to the office even earlier than expected, and I ended up having to spend several hours there. I finally got out and away, and my GPS told me that it would take 2 hours to get out to the Attwater Prairie Chicken NWR. I called Geoff and warned him that it would be late before I got there, but that I didn’t believe my GPS, he didn’t either, and said to come on out. It only took an hour and a half, so we were both right! I pulled in at about 1:15 and saw the White-tailed Hawk flying overhead. This is the bird that likes to perch on the windmill. I did not get a shot of him, because I was driving, but here is one of my previous pictures of him.

I parked and walked around the trail with Geoff and saw numbers of Vesper Sparrows.  During our walk on this fine January day, the wind picked up significantly.  It was still around 75 degrees.  Since the wind had picked up, the birds stayed down, but I did get a quick look at an Eastern Phoebe and Field Sparrow which sat on the barbed wire fence long enough for me to shoot these shots.

We then drove around the auto trail loop and looked at the lakes to see what kind of ducks we could find.  We mostly saw Ring-necked Ducks and Redheads.  There were also a number of Northern Harriers flying in the distance, with a larger than usual population of the blue males.  I really like the look of those birds!  Unfortunately, they never came close enough to get within my camera’s range.  Just as I came upon a flock of Sandhill Cranes, I got a call that my associate’s son had a medical emergency and that she was leaving.  We had appointment scheduled for less than an hour from then, and I needed to get back ASAP.  Obviously, if it took an hour and a half to get there, I wasn’t going to make it for that appointment, but I left and we rescheduled what we could.

That left me unfulfilled in terms of birding, so I called Steve to see if he wanted to go out on Saturday.  He had plans for the early morning but was available at about 10 and suggested that we go look for the Fish Crows and Longspurs to get as year birds.  I agreed, but knew that my list this year would be less than what it was last year because of some schedule changes, leaving me with less opportunities to do the trips that I did last year, at least that is the assumption.  I picked up Steve and we went out to the road outside of the local dump and looked for the crows.  They weren’t all lined up like they were last time, in fact they weren’t even there.  We had to drive around for awhile and look for crows, and then once finding them, listen for their croaky call.  The first ones we found that we thought might be Fish Crows were in fact American Crows.  Eventually, we found some, but had a hard time hearing them above the noise of the cars, but here is a short video of one calling.

Here are some bad pictures of an American Crow and a Fish Crow to show how much they look alike:

We then went to Highland Reservoir to look for the Longspurs.  There was a posting on Texbirds that they were not seen recently, but we walked the fields, making sure to walk through the tall yellow grass, which is where they like to hang out and eventually we flushed a flock of 8 or 9 Smith’s Longspurs.  They flew all the way across the field, out of sight without the binoculars and kept flying for a good 10 minutes, before landing next to some standing water, near the entrance to the field.  I thought that they were further than they really were, and fortunately, we saw some movement before we flushed them again.  It is amazing how close you can get to these birds once they settle and you don’t walk up on them too fast.  We had three birds within 20 feet of us just eating and drinking as if we were not even there.  Steve made sure that I knew how lucky we were.  I had no idea how rare they were in terms of the looks we were getting.

After looking at these great birds, we drove out to the Lynchberg Ferry to look for the Lessor Black-backed Gull that had been reported.  When we got there, there were very few gulls around, they were all in the aire circling a pretty decent distance away.  We did see a nice Belted Kingfisher up on the wire above the road, and I tried to get a decent shot, but the light and sky were working against me.

It was time for Steve to go home so that he could get some work done, so I drove him home and he suggested Meyer Park for some birds. It was very quiet, but I did get to look at a pair of Brown Thrashers, and I took some shots of a Great Egret and some Great-tailed Grackles.