Beyond the Patch: a Boat Trip

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I don't spend every day hanging around my yard.  Some days we leave our patch of birds on the banks of the Arroyo and take the boat out on the river to the Laguna Madre. At dawn we leave the dock and  ride for about 20 minutes until we get to the bay.


On the way out, we see Roseate Spoonbills, Tricolored Herons, Reddish Egrets and Brown Pelicans flying from rookeries on small islands to their feeding grounds in inlets and along the shores. We smell salty air and meet fishermen returning from overnight trips. Dolphins jump in front of our boat or ride in our wake.

Leaving the mouth of the Arroyo Colorado and crossing the Intercoastal Waterway, we enter shallow water, hoping to find red fish tailing in the "skinny" waters.  When we get close to herons stalking prey in water below their bellies, we know it's time to stop the boat and wade.  Or at least Brad wades and I stay in the boat unless I've brought my kayak along.

When the sun is still low over the horizon, its brilliant red reminds me of lines from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner:  "nor dim, nor red, like God's own head, the glorious sun uprist."

On this day we saw no fish in the shallow waters, or at least we didn't catch any, but the beauty of the sunrise made the trip worth it.  After exploring other fishing holes briefly, we decided to return to the Arroyo and go upriver looking for tarpon and snook.

I love a sunrise in the Laguna Madre, but the Arroyo is home.  If my birding "patch" is my yard, the Arroyo is an extended patch.  We boated back toward the west, past Adolph Thomae park, past Arroyo City, past our house.

Roseate Spoonbills flew above us.

Willets fished along the edge of the Arroyo.

A Crested Caracara looked on from his perch in a dead mesquite.

Passing by our house and all the other houses that line the south side of the river, we reach an area where houses disappear and both sides are lined with habitat referred to as "Arroyo Colorado Brush"  where dominant trees are Ebony, Coma, and Adelia and brush is thick and thorny. It is really only remnants of such habitat, however, as the land has been cleared for agriculture just beyond the brush along the banks.

But I like boating along the river and imagining a land where nothing has been cleared.   The state of Texas protects a portion of it as the Las Palomas Wildlife Management Area where native brush  is relatively undisturbed.

The bank pictured above shows fairly thick vegetation, but you can tell it has once been cleared because of the mesquite trees that are typical of disturbed land.  Nonetheless, it is perfect habitat for one of my favorite birds. We slow down when we get to this spot and use the trolling motor to move by quietly.

Can you see the excavation in the bank?  Perhaps the cavity is an enlarged  kingfisher hole. Or perhaps it is a hole made from collapsing dirt around tree roots.

A closer look reveals a ghostly face.

Binoculars (or a zoomed-in camera lens) reveal that tucked into the hole, high up in the bank, is a  family of Barn Owls!  I can see two down-covered chicks in front of the female in this nest. Others are probably there as well.  Barn Owls can have large broods and the mother does a good job of herding her brood back into the cave behind her.  

I've seen Barn Owls nesting in boat houses, nest boxes,  and barns near the river, but I see them most frequently in these cavities in the banks.  Pale and ghostly, they are hard to spot unless you know where to look. 

Sometimes I see them fly at night along the river on strong silent wings.  The males are lighter in color than the females and their almost white underparts make them look especially like ghosts in the night.  

         Barn Owls are not the only bank dwellers we saw on the trip upriver.  Another favorite pair of river birds announced their presence with loud machine-gun rattling and insistent bobbing up and down from branches overhanging the water:  a pair of Ringed Kingfishers courted near their nest holes on the opposite bank.  

This photo shows the kingfisher with mouth open and tail cocked, loudly answering the equally loud rattling of  its mate perched about 50 feet upriver.   Ringed Kingfishers are one of three species of kingfishers here in the Rio Grande Valley.  Green Kingfishers, also here year-round, are much smaller and green.  The Belted Kingfishers that winter here (the only kingfisher in most of the US) look similar except that they are about three inches smaller and their beaks are not nearly as large.  

I wasn't able to figure out for sure which of several holes in the bank belonged to the kingfishers.  They seem to like to make extras.





Groove-billed Anis sang in a mesquite tree along the river. Below is a photo of an ani that was banded  a week ago  in the Las Palomas WMA that borders the Arroyo near where the owl and kingfishers nest. I have volunteered to help with the banding a few times.

At first glance, anis look like grackles, but the beak of course is distinctive, as is their posture and their two-note call.  We've been seeing anis on the fence across the arroyo.  In years past I've watched them ride on the backs of deer, eating ticks.  (I know:  yuck!  But such interesting things to be seen from the window overlooking the river is the reason my spotting scope never leaves its spot at the back window.)

Another highlight of the trip upriver was a good look at the longest Altamira Oriole nest I have ever seen. It seemed twice as long as the nest Altamira Orioles built this year in our oak tree.  Comparing the nest in this photo to the ten-inch oriole that is peering inside, I'm guessing the nest is a minimum of two feet long.

All in all, our boat trip was successful even without catching fish. We love living here on the Arroyo Colorado where a short boat ride extends our backyard beyond its narrow borders.

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This is an experiment:  I've never posted a video before but I did take one of the Ringed Kingfishers.  You can see only one bird in this wobbly movie, but you can hear both of them calling back and forth.  Apologies for the poor camera work--but it's so much fun to watch these birds bobbing up and down and to listen to their loud rattling calls that I am posting it anyway.  Or at least trying to.  Lets hope it works.

Water Works

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Whoever wrote that little ditty about April showers didn't live in South Texas.  We do have the spring flowers (those that require little moisture), but we haven't had a drop of rain.  And a drop is about all we had in March.  Add to that temperatures already approaching 100 (and at least once this week exceeding) and winds of about 30 mph day and night (gusting to 60), and you get really dry conditions.

That's why all the avian action is staying pretty close to water sources these days--- like this  Northern Kiskadee drinking from a bird bath that's just across the driveway from the Ebony tree where its nest is under construction.  A copper dripping tube keeps water moving in this bath and attracts birds by sound as well as sight.  (Moving water is key to busy baths.  Some of our dripper systems are as simple a plastic jug with a hole in it suspended over a saucer.)

Green Jays also stay close to baths, dipping in several times a day.

I've been a little worried that the Screech-owls' nesting in a box very close to this particular bird bath might deter the bathing, but it apparently hasn't.  One bird or several are almost always there.

Except for a while yesterday morning when this bather took his turn: 

 A Cooper's Hawk always clears baths and feeders for awhile.  Not long after his drink, the hawk managed to snag a Red-winged Blackbird out of the air,  leaving only a feather or two settling in the dust of the driveway.   

I actually don't begrudge the hawk a blackbird or two--we still have hundreds!  I know many backyard watchers up north are still awaiting the Red-winged grain-devourers as early harbingers of spring, but I am really tired of them here.  One or two seem always to be scouting for the moment I fill the feeders, and before I get back to the garage, a few hundred are in the yard.  Their numbers are decreasing but not quick enough for me.  I love them for their beauty and I love them two at a time, but I just can't afford to keep feeding the hordes.  The third bird with the two red-winged raiders in the photo to the right is a Bronzed Cowbird.  They have shown up in the yard this week, ready to pester the orioles as soon as nest-building begins. 

The main water feature of the backyard is of course the Arroyo Colorado, a smaller river when it flows through Harlingen and a larger dredged shipping channel when its mixture of salt water and fresh water rises and falls with the tides as it passes our back yard.  Herons, egrets, terns, night-herons, gulls, ospreys, pelicans, cormorants, and many other water birds follow the arroyo, wading along the edge and resting in the trees along the banks. 

One of my favorite river birds is the Black-bellied Whistling Duck, the guy in the photo on the left.  Early this morning a group of eighteen Black-bellied Whistling Ducks landed on our dock and the roof of our neighbor's, waiting to share a feeder with the blackbirds. They'll do this each morning and evening for a while.  Then we'll have fewer at a time until the nearest nesting pair start bringing their large families back to the feeders.  

Another favorite bird that is always on the arroyo is the Night Heron, mostly Black-crowned but sometimes Yellow-crowned.  

The bright red eye of the Black-crowned Night-Heron is sometimes the first thing I spot when the bird hides in the oak tree.

First year night-herons are brown with large white spots. 

The long neck of this young night-heron makes me think it might be a Yellow-crowned Night-Heron rather than a Black-crowned one, though I'm not sure.  It just struck me as different, I took a photo, and later it occurred to me that maybe it was different,  I think the spots are a little smaller, also, another field mark of the very similar BCNH. 

Last week an adult Yellow-crowned Night Heron fished across the river.  Adults are easy to tell apart, even when the YCNH is scrunching its neck down in a posture more like the BCNH.

If it weren't for the water that draws in the birds, we would probably not see many birds on these hot windy days.  The wind is definitely keeping migrants from stopping by, though I have seen a couple of  Hooded Warblers at the baths.  

Hooded Orioles have paired up and like to bathe together.  Here are a male and female in a Mexican Olive tree just prior to a dip in the water-filled saucer below the tree. 

So that's the news of the week from our dry, hot, windy yard.  I'll keep filling up the baths and turning on the drippers in the front yard and the river will keep flowing past the back.  That will bring in the birds and all of us will be happy.  Unless a hungry Cooper's Hawk snags another black bird.  In the natural world not everybird  can live happily everafter.

Color an Osprey Sky

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Finally, it is autumn on the Arroyo Colorado.

We really do have four seasons, though first-time visitors sometimes think it's just one long summer.  (I thought so, too, that first disorienting year we were here, twenty-one years ago.)  The leaves of only a few trees change color. Our Rio Grande Ash, for example, sheds yellow leaves sometime after Thanksgiving and is budding by Valentines' day, and Mesquites sprinkle leaves on the ground in a windy cold front--here one day and gone the next. Many of the trees keep leaves all year; flowering shrubs and wildflowers bloom almost continually.

But small things mean a lot here, and for that reason I like the subtly changing seasons, and especially autumn when that first "cool" day is such a relief.  

That first hint of coolness crept in this week.  Tuesday morning we awoke to low humidity and temperatures in the 60's!  One step onto the back porch reminded me that it was autumn indeed, not just on the calendar.  A familiar bird call made me look up:  against the clear cool blue sky, an osprey glided over the river, home from his northern summer.  Our autumn and winter skies are seldom without an osprey and his loud whistle as he soared was musical and welcome. 

Ospreys are not the only birds above the river these days.  Cattle Egrets fly low over the water, especially in the evenings;  small shore birds fly with short direct wing beats,  moving too quickly to identify.   (An occasional Spotted Sandpiper stops to teeter-totter along the dock, the slower movement making him just about the only sandpiper I can ID for sure.  Here's one that stopped by yesterday. His spots are gone, another sign that autumn is here.)



Long lines of larger shore birds are also a sign of fall.  I haven't seen returning ducks or geese yet, and the White Pelicans are still up north, but today a line of dark ibises flew by, silhouetted against another blue blue sky. 

White-faced Ibises fly in groups of all-dark birds, not the mixed dark and light of the White Ibises with their darker juveniles.  The sky in this picture is lovely. When I saw this photo, and the Osprey sky above,  I  starting wondering just what shade of blue "Sky Blue" would be on one of those little  wheels or cards that paint companies display at building supply stores. I can't pass by that aisle in Lowe's without browsing through the color palettes.

Because color intrigues me,  one of my favorite  Iphone apps is Sherwin-Williams'  "Color Snap."  You can snap a picture with your Iphone, or use a photo you have already saved, and learn what Sherwin-Williams paint color a certain area of the photo matches.  Now, of course, I know that photos vary from printer to printer and the world has many more colors than a computer or camera has, but let's forget all that and pretend that a sky really can be matched through a photo to a paint chip.  According to my Iphone app, the Osprey sky and Ibis sky are both Danube, color # 6803.  Or at least the upper right part of the Osprey sky is Danube.  The bottom left is Jacaranda, #6802 and the part that is covered with wispy clouds just above the Osprey is Notable Hue, #6521.  Certainly it is notable as well as beautiful.  I may just paint the ceiling of  my porch Danube or Jacaranda or Notable Hue.

Okay, this is getting fun.  I'm sending photos via email from my computer to my phone and color-snapping away.  I tried this photo of a Tropical Kingbird that perched on a palm tree in the yard.  Yesterday I snapped a dozen pictures, marveling at the clear colors in the cool morning, and now I am curious about labels for those colors.  (In another life maybe I'll be one of those people who make up color names for paint companies.)

 Again, the sky is Jacaranda.  The lovely shade of yellow on the  kingbird's breast is part Jonquil and part Daisy.


Here's another colorful photo.  The butterfly is a Two-banded Flasher, its back appropriately labeled Flyway on the color chart.  The butterfly is like one my neighbor  carried over from the Esperanza shrub between our houses.  It flew away before I answered the door, but when we returned to the Esperanza, others were there along with  three different species of long-tailed butterflies.

This Flasher looks stunning on the yellow petals of the Turnera diffusa (Mexican Damiana), a small shrub  that blooms randomly along the walkway, wherever it can find a patch of sun, and folds its petals as dusk approaches.

Below is a  Long-tailed Skipper sporting a lovely shade of green (Rook Wood Dark Green) that nicely complements its brown wings (Rock Garden).

My handy Color-Snap app would identify complementary colors for any color in my palette, but I think Nature does the best job of that.  What could be more complementary than the yellow hues of the kingbird's breast against the blue of the sky,  or the blue of the flasher against the bright blossoms of the Turnera?  I'm inspired to paint my porch ceiling Jacaranda and my porch swing Daisy--a lovely combination.  Nature is a pretty good exterior decorator.


My last post (a month ago! I apologize for being lazy about writing) chronicled the abundance of late summer in the yard.  I thought then the hummers were thick around our feeders and nectar plants, but this first week in October seems the height of their migration. We have mostly Ruby-throated with a few Black-chinned and the resident Buff-bellied Hummingbirds. 

The colors of these hummers look washed out in the photo because it was late in the day, and I used a flash, which disturbed the hungry little birds not a bit.  They ravenously drink the feeder dry in just a day and a half.  All of these are female or immature Ruby-throated Hummingbirds.  I haven't seen an adult male for a couple of weeks.  I'm reminded of Emily Dickinson's description of the fleeting brilliance of a hummingbird: 

 A Route of Evanescence
 With a revolving Wheel --
 A Resonance of Emerald --
A Rush of Cochineal --

 I just checked Color Snap to see if Sherwin-Williams uses Emily's labels for their colors (by chance, of course).  But no, the hummer's throat is Vermillion, not Cochineal. (Another wonderful color, vermillion:  I'm anxiously awaiting the return of our winter Vermillion Flycatchers. I'll let you know if a photo of the male matches S-W's vermillion.)

Out of curiosity, I just looked up cochineal on the web.  I knew it denoted red, another word for carmine.  What I didn't know is that it is a red made from natural dyes created from smashed up cochineal bugs!   The tiny bugs live on nopal prickly pear cacti.  In the fifteenth century the dye was extremely valuable, second only to silver as the most valuable export from Mexico. (I'm pretty sure we have those little bugs here in the Rio Grande Valley.  I'll have to check with a bug expert.)

Once again, Emily Dickinson has chosen a perfect word to describe the ruby throat of the hummingbird, accurate in color and connoting a sense of treasure as well.  The photo here does not begin to show the glittering iridescence of its ruby throat, but Dickinson's poem almost does.

Finally, here's a photo that I think captures the color of one tiny bit of the yard.  I won't even try to label its colors with Sherwin-Williams' clever marketing tool.  Indeed, the colors may exist only in my mind. You may not see them as I do.  What I'm trying to say, as I look at this perfect bee, is what I think Emily Dickinson means in another brief but memorable poem:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,---
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

This bee and fiddlewood are not of the prairie, but are a small corner of  what botanists call the Arroyo Colorado brush.  Like Emily's prairie,  I can "make" the brush in my mind by evoking the colors of the golden-winged honey bee and the green/white petals of the native fiddlewood.  I can snap photos and look at the brush from my deck if I'm here--but if I'm away from home, I can make a little patch of South Texas brushland and the Arroyo Colorado with the colors in my mind.  Reverie will do.

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I wrote this entry a week ago and then forgot to post it, but  I'll go ahead and date it as though I posted it then.  The weather continues to be lovely and the skies are just as blue. Hummers have decreased in number but still swarm the nectar a dozen or so at a time, competing with bees and each other. 


The Arroyo Colorado Audubon Society had its "Big Sit!" here on Sunday and counted 86 species of birds, including some I hadn't yet seen this fall--Merlins, Kestrels, Gray Catbird, White Pelicans to name a few.  I'll write about the Big Sit later.  Right now I hear  the unmistakable call of an osprey.  I am going right out to sit in a lawn chair under the blue (Jacaranda or perhaps Danube) Osprey sky!

An Obsession of Pelicans

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It is almost impossible to look toward the river these days and not see a pelican.  Brown Pelicans fish along the river all day long, sometimes flying so low that their primary wing feathers barely clear the water, and sometimes rising high into the air and then plunging into the water beak-first, twisting as they dive and popping up facing the opposite direction. In a previous post, I noted that a group of pelicans is called a squadron, a pod, a scoop, or a pouch.  Sometimes I think that the collective noun for my pelicans should be obsession, for that is what they seem to have become for me!)

The pelican in the photograph above floated for awhile after its dive, spinning on top of the unusually still water that reflected a nearly perfect inverted image.  About five minutes later,  two other pelicans flew by at medium height, in their flap-flap-flap-glide, flap-flap-flap glide rhythm, and the bird joined them.

I wrote about the pouches of these ponderous birds a couple of weeks ago when I began looking specifically at the colors of the adult pelicans in their breeding plumage.  The feathers of their heads have turned golden on top and  dark brown on the back of the neck.  I'm still looking carefully at the pouch color of every Brown Pelican I see, trying to determine how many of them have the red pouches usually attributed to the California subspecies. (The pouches of the  Atlantic subspecies that you would assume birds here on the Texas coast to be is usually a brown or dark olive color.)  I see one such bird with the red gular pouch at least once a day -- but only one bird a time--which really doesn't tell me how many there actually are. The pelican in the photo above, taken from our dock, has the red pouch I'm talking about, opened wide just after the bird has scooped up a mullet. Stretched like this, the pouch is not quite as dark red at it appears when the bird is at rest, but you can nonetheless see that it is redder than the pouches of most of our Texas Brown Pelicans.


Last Friday we took the boat out, heading a few miles downriver toward the Laguna Madre, the "Mother Lagoon" between the south Texas coast and South Padre Island.  I counted Brown Pelicans as we went along, losing count a couple of times but seeing at least fifty.  Only one of the birds we saw was red-pouched.

That's it in the back of the picture below, behind the one that has its head straight up, stretching its beak and pouch. I read that they do this stretching exercise to keep their pouches supple for scooping up meals.

 

These guys, lined up on a neighbor's dock,  must be tired from making so many of those twisting, turning plunge-dives. 

 

I've noticed an apparent  range of sizes in Brown Pelicans.  Notice how much larger the one on the right seems to be than the other three. 

 

This one reminds me of one of those old fashioned decorative doorstops---you would pick it up by the beak and prop it in front of the outside door to keep the wind from slamming it shut. 

Not only have the Brown Pelicans gone through their seasonal changes in appearance, but so too have the American White Pelicans.  In late winter they grow strange fibrous bumps or keels on their upper beaks.  The color of the beaks change from yellow to pale pink and then bright orange. This white pelican floated placidly in the river not long after the the departure of the brown one pictured at the top of this post.  Notice the river water is rippled now.  It seldom stays as glassy still as it was early that morning.

On our boat trip downriver (we never made it as far as the bay) we scouted out not only pelicans, but other wading birds as well.  A Long-billed Curlew waded in the shallow water along the edge (above).

A small group of  White Ibises caught crabs in a small inlet.   (The collective noun for a group of ibises is a congregation or stand or wedge.  I'll say that we saw a stand of ibisis.  These guys were standing but also hopping and shuffling and probing in the shallow water for small wiggly crabs like the one grasped in the beak of the ibis in this photo. Click to enlarge if you can't see the crab.You can tell it has just been caught because the churned up bubbles are still on the surface of the water. )

The Arroyo Colorado,  once an ancient tributary of the Rio Grande River, is now surrounded by agricultural fields. Below the Port of Harlingen it has  been  dredged and widened  for use  as a shipping channel off the Intracoastal Waterway.   But small inlets and "old Arroyo" loops remain, wonderful places to ease a shallow-water boat into or paddle a kayak along.  A narrow border of native scrub along the edge retrieves for a small space a remnant of  habitat that once extended across the valley.

Sitting quietly in a boat in the shallow waters of a little inlet, you can watch a stand of ibises catch small wiggly crabs and pretend the arroyo scrub forest extends for miles and miles beyond the river.

A Pouch of Pelicans

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When you were a kid, did you learn that poem, "A wonderful bird is the pelican/His bill will hold more than his belican..."?
I can't remember who wrote it (though I do know it wasn't Ogden Nash) or how the rest of it goes, but I do agree that the pelican is a wonderful bird. On days like today I find that silly rhyme running through my head.

I've spent the day watching Brown Pelicans. I love to see them fly over the river, watch for fish, and then dive in the water with a twisting motion, hitting it hard enough to make a loud splash. Sometimes two or three pelicans will be fishing together and dive at almost the same time. As they enter the water, they fold their wings and go in beak-first. The twisting motion must continue underwater, for they always come up facing opposite of the direction they went in. They slam in hard and come up fast. If their dive is successful, they stretch their throats upward and you can often see a fish filling out the pouch before they swallow it. Mullet and menhaden fish are their preferred food (according to what I've read) and we definitely have those in the arroyo. (Menhaden are the silver "shiners" that fishermen net up for bait, and mullet are the silvery fish that jump out of the water, sometimes in a series of three or more leaps. People don't like to eat either menhaden or mullet, but the pelicans certainly do.)

Yesterday the bird in the photo above made a loud splashing dive just out from the dock as I watched from the porch. I wasn't specifically looking for pelicans and at first I paid little attention to it. But something seemed different about this bird. I kept looking at it, first as it ate the fish it caught in its dive and then as it paddled around for awhile. I noted that it was in breeding plumage, a yellow/gold on its head and dark brown on the hindneck, but that wasn't the difference I was sensing. Lots of the pelicans I'd been watching for the last couple of weeks had that.
It wasn't until I looked at the photos I'd taken that I realized what didn't seem right: its gular pouch was not dark brown or gray as most of the Brown Pelicans I see, but a surprising red. I checked several field guides. Most didn't even mention this coloring at all, but the couple that did identified it as a fieldmark of the pacific or California subspecies. This guy might be a long way from home! I don't know how many of "our" pelicans have this coloration--but it is beautiful!

Today I watched for Brown Pelicans all day so that I could get an idea of how many had the red pouch--and I only saw one. It may be the same one I saw yesterday, of course. I saw dozens of the birds flying and floating and diving but only one that looked the same as the photo above. I'll keep watching. Tomorrow we may go out to the bay where there will be many more birds to compare.

One last Pelican note--while reading about them on the internet, I found out that a group of pelicans is called a pod, a pouch, a scoop, or a squadron. I especially like the last two designations. I've seen White Pelicans fish at night on the river, strongly paddling in a v-formation, scooping their beaks back and forth in the water almost in unison, "herding" the fish to the birds in the back. That was definitely a Scoop of Pelicans! Tonight I saw a scoop of 34 pelicans, and at last I got a (rather fuzzy) night photo.

What does this look like to you-- a Pod, a Scoop, or a Squadron of Pelicans?