Highlights from Texas Upper Coast

We just finished a memorable week on the Upper Texas Coast (and a little of the Louisiana Coast) with visits to all the famous migrant trap woodlands, the piney woods to the north and the thickets of the Big Thicket. Beginning in Houston, we barely left the city before we found a couple of cooperative Red-cockaded Woodpeckers.

Further along on the edge of the Big Thicket, we encountered both the very locally breeding Prairie Warbler...

…and a few spectacular migrating Swallow-tailed Kites.

Our days on the coast were spent driving around rice fields, sifting shorebirds, admiring wading birds, and repeatedly visiting the coastal woodlands in search of migrant songbirds resting up after their exhausting flight across the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes, though, they were birds that flew around the Gulf, like this Cape May Warbler that winters in the Caribbean and migrates north through Florida.

This Scarlet Tanager, however, must have blasted in from South America and was taking a break in the woods at High Island.

Sometimes the birds were a bit sneakier, like this American Bittern poking its camouflaged self out of the vegetation.

…or, not sneaky at all, and just as wild and wonderful as anything could be. This is one pair of many Roseate Spoonbills nesting in the massive heronry at the Smith Oaks Sanctuary on High Island.

There was plenty to keep us busy, birds and non-birds alike. Here, the group had finished looking at some Upland Sandpipers and decided to climb into a swampy roadside ditch to look at Spider Lilies.