Blog #3. 28-30 April 2019. LRGV (Mainly South Padre Island, Texas)

   a mix of shorebirds foraging in the South Padre Island flats

South Padre Island is south Texas’s answer to Miami Beach—a shiny and bright and heavily developed barrier island, where people come to don bathing suits and flipflops and hang out and drink tropical drinks. It also is a great birding destination, both for songbirds and for waterbirds. I visited twice and the second round got the hang of its birding opportunities.

    Black-bellied Plover in breeding plumage

The bay side of the barrier island has a number of flats that attract migrating shorebirds. These birds, flying from the tropics north to the Arctic in many cases, need to stop and refuel along the way. Flying at high altitude, the northward-flying birds manage to scope of the very best stop-over sites.

One finds both plovers and sandpipers on these flats. And they come in all shapes and size and colors. Some are shy and skittish, and yet others allow close approach...

     Adult breeding Ruddy Turnstone

Of course, when hunting for shorebirds, one encounters other wetland species, ducks, herons, ibis, spoonbills, and more. All of these are here in abundance in the LRGV.

    Short-billed Dowitchers

Just to the south of the best sandflat on South Padre Island is the Convention Center, the owners of which were clever enough to construct a small refuge woodland behind the giant building. This has water features and other attractions to bring in the migrating songbirds of spring.

    A flock of small sandpipers known informally as "peeps"

So one find shorebirds 100 meters to the north, and songbirds in profusion in a tiny woodland next to the Convention Center. Birders flock there in season to watch and photograph the songbirds…

And there’s more! Just south of the Convention Center (a quarter mile) is the South Padre Island Bird Center, another birding hotspot that features a boardwalk, a marsh, a mudflat, some bayshore, and several small refuge woodlands with water features and cut oranges to attract the songbird migrants.

    Mottled Duck at the Birding Center, just south of the Convention Center

The songbirds are famished from their travels and allow close approach. The day I visited the Convention Center’s small woodlots, the trees were filled with colorful birds. 

              Adult Rose-breasted Grosbeak

       

A female Cerulean Warbler bathed in a tiny puddle just below a concrete sidewalk where more than twenty people gawked at this species bird at ever-so close range (it was literally at their feet).

    Scissor-tailed Flycatcher

Then a Worm-eating Warbler approached the birding group and flew onto the short of one of the volunteers who was preparing cut oranges for deployment. The bird then perched on her binoculars. Few had ever seen a Worm-eating Warbler at such close range. Up and down the coast of Padre Island, Scissor-tailed Flycatchers were present in large numbers, perched on vegetation or out on the bare mudflats. They clearly had just arrived from a long migratory flight...

    Royal Terns, dowitchers, Black Skimmers, Laughing Gulls

I was told a Mexican specialty, a Flame-colored Tanager, showed up in the Convention Center woodlands the day before I visited. This made the day of the several people who observed it and managed to identify it. I looked for it without success.

    Scarlet Tanager male

 For me and the others of the day I visited, Townsend’s Warbler was the highlight—a western species better known from California.

    Townsend's Warbler

Speaking of western species, there were Yellow-headed Blackbirds parked in the front of the Convention center with a flock of cowbirds.

    Yellow-headed Blackbird

Thank heavens for these constructed woodlots, for much of the LRGV is rowcrop agriculture. Not much for the migrants there! The same can be said for the very urban South Padre Island. A few smart people have made safe green spaces for our migrants in little-known corners of the island. They are conservation heroes!