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.

More Signs of Spring

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Curve-billed Thrashers were the busiest of the nest-builders in our yard today.  This one looked at me warily as I raised my camera to capture him and his building material, dried vines that I had been clearing out of the butterfly garden.  In this photo he's perched on a light post at the end of the neighbor's driveway,  getting ready to hop into the yucca where the nest is located.  Both male and female are participating in nest building. I've stayed far away from the site so as not to disturb them, but they see me anyway.

I haven't seen the actual nest yet, just two very busy thrashers going in and out of the Spanish Daggers.

Cattle Egrets were lined up all along the rails of the deck above the boat lift this morning, on all four sides of the square.  At different times today I saw Cattle Egrets, Snowy Egrets, and Great Egrets along the river.  A group of seven Reddish Egrets flew by this evening, six white ones and one dark.  (This is one of those interesting species with two color morphs, one pure white and one dark gray with reddish-gray  necks and heads. )

Hundreds, maybe thousands (I need to look that up) of Reddish Egrets nest in a rookery on Green Island  which is just north of the mouth of the Arroyo Colorado, about ten miles downriver from us.  Green Island, one of the few natural islands in the Laguna Madre (most of the islands are really spoil banks made from the dredging of the Intracoastal Waterway)  is covered with very thick thorny brush, good protection for what is supposed to be the largest nesting colony of Reddish Egrets in the world.  Protected by the Audubon Society, the rookery is home primarily to Reddish Egrets and Roseate Spoonbills with other herons and egrets nesting there as well.  We fish near there sometimes but not too near so that we don't disturb the nesting birds.  Huge signs warn fishermen away,  and I've never seen anyone get too close.  I love to sit in the boat and watch the egrets, spoonbills, and herons fly overheadon their way to and from the rookery.  Roseate Spoonbills are especially beautiful when caught in the early morning sunlight. 

A short news clip  here  shows some of the Island's feathered inhabitants as videoed by outdoor writer Richard Moore for a local television station.  It's a wonderful video.  Click on it to see our local breeding birds.   

The rookery on Green Island has been very important in increasing the numbers of Reddish Egrets since the early 1900's when they were almost hunted out of existence for their beautiful plumes that decorated ladies' hats.

Another sign of spring in our yard is the increased activity of Green Anoles.  This one is not green, but he is certainly showing off his dewlap.  I took this photo of him two days ago while sitting on the front deck.  If brown coloring shows that he is unhappy or stressed, then this guy is not feeling great.  He's still a handsome lizard, but I like them most when they are green.

When we visited my sister in Florida last summer we saw the brown anoles  (Cuban Anoles) that live there.  They are not native to the United States as the Green Anole is, and their appearance in Florida has overtaken most of the Green Anole population there.

This guy is definitely happier than the one pictured above (if, that is, happiness in these lizards is measured by their color, which changes from green to brown).  Until I photographed several anoles in the last few days, I had not noticed the beautiful blue coloring around their eyes.  Click to enlarge for a good look.  (Click also on the brown one above.)

If you look at the third anole photo, you'll see why the second anole looks so fresh and spring-y.  He has just molted!  I took the molting picture about an hour before the other one.  This lizard was the same size and in the same place as the brown guy I had seen  the day before.  Since I know anoles are territorial, I think this is probably the same one.  Maybe he was so brown because his skin felt old and uncomfortable!  (I know I'm anthropomorphizing here.  I'm abandoning all pretense of being scientific.) 

Today I started down the back stairs and saw two anoles locked in combat.  (Maybe one of them was the one I had photographed  on the back deck who had ventured to the wrong side of the house.) One of the two had the other one's head grasped in his mouth.  I ran back inside to grab the camera but was too late.  They had separated, but it was still a standoff.  I took a picture just as my cat, who had slipped out the door with me, scared them--and the picture shows one very green anole and one leg of another anole as it scurried out of my photo!  At least its leg was still attached to its body--if the cat and I hadn't scared them away, I'm not sure how the battle would have turned out. 


When I was a kid they sold Green Anoles at the circus with little strings around their necks and pins on the strings so you could wear them.  They called them "chameleons."  I shudder to think about those wonderful lizards that could change colors and catch bugs and puff up bright pink dewlaps, being "worn" by less-than-careful little kids.  Of course our mom would not let us have one.  She was a teacher, interested in and respectful of all living things.  In one of my favorite photos of her, taken by my dad just a week or two after they had met, she is holding a lizard up to his camera and smiling.  I hope I have passed on to my children and grandchildren the same love and respect for nature that my parents gave to me.

Yard list note:  One yard bird has made its first appearance of 2010 and I'm sad to see it back, even though it is a very interesting bird:  the Bronzed Cowbirds are back ready to parasitize the nests of the Hooded Orioles.  I'll tell more about these unwelcome birds when I get a picture of them.  Meanwhile, I'll add them and the Nashville Warbler that I saw a few days ago to the year list in the sidebar.