Scissor-tailed Flycatchers are spectacular and widespread along the Upper Texas Coast. Photo: Stéphane Moniotte
There may be no better birdwatching in North America than one encounters on the Upper Texas Coast in spring. Between mid-March and mid-May, masses of waterbirds and passerines wing north from their wintering grounds and a significant percentage of them pass through this corridor. The waterbirds are a constant as large numbers of herons and spoonbills, shorebirds of 30 or more species and a profusion of gulls and terns fill places like Bolivar Flats and Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge.
Less predictable but perhaps even more spectacular are the countless thousands of migrant thrushes, vireos, warblers and buntings that reach the Upper Texas Coast after completing their lengthy trans-Gulf of Mexico migration. If the weather is fair, most of these birds pass on and disperse among the more suitable forests in the interior but if they encounter rain or strong north winds before or as they reach the coast, large numbers may drop into the first isolated clumps of oaks such as those at High Island and Sabine Woods. The phenomenon constitutes one of the great visible migration spectacles in North America.
The migrants alone would draw birdwatchers to Texas but amazingly there’s more; nearby pine woods and cypress swamps are home to some of North America’s most sought-after breeding birds. Texas in April is simply full of birds.
This tour can be taken in conjunction with our tour Texas: The Edwards Plateau, Big Bend National Park and the Davis Mountains.
Day 1: The trip begins at 6 p.m. at our hotel near Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Night in Houston.
Day 2: We’ll spend the first part of the morning at Jones State Forest north of Houston. Here we’ll look for a number of birds we may not encounter again, notably the endangered Red-cockaded Woodpecker and other species such as Red-headed and Pileated Woodpeckers. In the late morning we’ll drive to Liberty where we’ll have a picnic while scanning the skies for Swallow-tailed Kite which has nested near here in recent years. We may also see Yellow-crowned Night-Heron, Acadian Flycatcher and Prothonotary Warbler. After lunch we’ll continue on to High Island. Night in Winnie.
Days 3-7: These five days will be varied and, we hope, spectacular. The central focus will be High Island and Sabine Woods, celebrated landbird migrant traps but ones that requires special weather to produce a major fall of birds. If we’re lucky, cuckoos, thrushes, vireos, warblers of 25 or more species, tanagers, buntings and orioles will fill these small woods and provide a memorable birdwatching experience. We cannot be sure that High Island will be this productive, but with five days there is a reasonable chance we’ll encounter a Texas-sized concentration of migrants.
As High Island tends to have more migrants in the afternoon we’ll spend several mornings looking at waterbirds: the heron rookery at nearby Smith Oaks offering intimate looks at nesting Roseate Spoonbill, Tricolored Heron and Snowy and Great Egrets; Rollover Pass and the famous Bolivar Flats, where rich waterbird assemblages can include thousands of herons, gulls, terns and shorebirds of up to 20 species including Piping and Wilson’s Plovers, often American Oystercatcher and sometimes thousands of brilliant American Avocets; fields near Winnie, if flooded, can hold thousands of shorebirds, mostly different from those on Bolivar Flats, including American Golden-Plover and Pectoral, often White-rumped and Buff-breasted Sandpipers and sometimes Hudsonian Godwit; and the wonderful marshes at Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, home to Least Bittern, White-faced Ibis, Clapper and King Rails, Purple Gallinule, Seaside, Nelson’s Sharp-tailed and Le Conte’s Sparrows and, if conditions are right, Yellow and just possibly Black Rail.
We’ll also visit eastern Texas from Jasper to Beaumont, where cypress swamps and pine woods are home to Fish Crow, Brown- headed Nuthatch, Bachman’s Sparrow and Swainson’s Warbler among others and where migrant raptors such as Mississippi Kite are often in evidence.
On one day we’ll visit Cameron Parish in southwestern Louisiana. Crossing the Sabine River, we may see a few Cave Swallows that nest under the bridge with the many Cliff Swallows. As we travel east to Johnson’s Bayou and a normally uncrowded Baton Rouge Audubon Society woodlot that captures migrants in the same way as High Island and Sabine Woods, we’ll travel through miles of unbroken fresh water marsh filled with King Rails, often with downy black chicks. Hurricane Rita in September of 2005 severely affected the coast of southwest Louisiana but it had largely recovered by the spring of 2007. Nights in Winnie
Day 8: After a final day in the High Island area, we’ll return to Houston. Night in Houston.
Day 9: The tour concludes this morning in Houston.
Updated: 30 March 2008
Prices
- 2008 price about $2,280
- Single Occupancy Supplement $380
- 2009 price not yet available
Notes
Maximum one-leader group size is reduced from eight to seven beginning in 2008. Maximum two-leader group size remains 14.