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.

Night Windows and a Morning Feeder-Dance

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Last night I sat down in the living room after dark to start writing a blog, but soon became distracted by the arroyo night framed in windows across the room. The fishing light was making a circle of green on the river. The far bank was gathering light and casting reflections of upside-down trees, bank, and fence onto the still water. The image of sky in the river was black (opposite of what it is now: silver gray against the deep green of daytime shadows). I could see both real trees, grass, and banks glowing in the light cast across the river and, just beneath them, inverted reflected ones. At the edges of the windows all was black.
Suddenly, great white forms began moving through the picture as dozens of American White Pelicans streamed by, their unseen but powerful feet moving them through the circle of light as they paddled upriver. We counted 93 in all. I moved closer to the window and watched until they were out of sight.

A few minutes later a Barn Owl flew over the river going in the opposite direction, its white breast and wings shining a ghostly white against the dark sky. (I've heard that many legends of ghosts in graveyards stem from the Barn Owls that could be seen flying at night out of the church steeples where they lived next to the graveyards.)

I used to see Barn Owls in holes along the banks a couple of miles up river where we fish for tarpon and snook. But last week when we looked for the Barn Owls, we saw that large portions of the bank had caved in, probably because of all the rain we've been getting, and the holes had collapsed. I took a picture of one hole that looked almost big enough for owls, but I could not see any owls peering out as I used to. I think the owls sometimes enlarge these old kingfisher nest holes for their nests and sometimes use cavities that emerge among roots of trees when the banks cave in. I'll keep looking this spring, and maybe I can get a photograph.

Here's what I had intended to write about last night. When the oriole/hummingbird feeders were covered with bees earlier in the week, I took them down for a day and then replaced them with a less bee-friendly kind. So far the bees haven't returned, but the feeders are "humming" with activity: hummingbirds (the little Ruby-throated/Black-chinned and the larger pugnacious Buff-bellieds), orioles (the Altamira pair and the single Baltimore that is still spending his winter vacation with us) and Orange-crowned Warblers seem to be even more active in the cold mornings. Yesterday I watched the Altamira Orioles, an Orange-crowned Warbler and a Buff-bellied hummer take turns at the nectar. If the orioles were on the feeder, the little warbler waited on the railing of the deck or perched atop an old wooden oar, while the hummer waited in the fiddlewood. All remained within two or three feet of the nectar feeder. They traded places by turns, it seemed, and so quickly I couldn't keep up with them with my camera. As I lifted the camera to snap the oriole, I'd look through the viewer and see a warbler! Even a Black-crested Titmouse took a turn. (The photo here is obviously not from today; you can see the titmouse is at the other feeder, before the bees laid siege to it a few days ago.) From my warm place inside the house, I enjoyed watching the feeder-dance for a good part of the morning while the birds switched places, bobbing and weaving, as though choreographed.




Update (February 18, 2010): This morning, in the rain, the dance of the nectar-eaters resumed. This female Yellow-fronted Woodpecker was not as polite in awaiting her turn. Though not as graceful as some of the other participants, and certainly not as patient, she was able to get her share of sugar water.