Bird Photography on the Strip

There are some really big things in Texas. As you get nearer to South Padre Island and the beach, they get bigger and bigger. Seashells. Dinosaurs. Menacing gorillas. Volcanoes. That kind of thing.

For whatever reason, perhaps Freddie's '80's 'do, this water tower cracks me up. It's big, too.

We were after much smaller things. Like this leetle pied-billed grebe who was floating around preening hisself just off the South Padre Island Convention Center boardwalk.

He's fluffling himself, and the vibrations spread as if he were a tuning fork. I don't really understand how grebe plumage can be at once so fluffy and waterproof. I think it has to do with sleeking down, and abundant oil in the feathers. Really, though, they look like feather dusters, and you wouldn't dunk one of those in the water and expect it to float. Just another mystery to leave unsolved.

I had a pied-billed grebe in my hand who had hit a powerline years ago. He weighed a full pound. I was amazed at the density and heft for his size. Ballast for dives, I guess. They're powerful birds, who migrate at night on tiny narrow wings. So much we don't know or appreciate about grebes. They are extremely cool birds.

There were so many wonderful things hidden in the reeds that walking the marvelous boardwalks was like being in a Highlights for Children double-page spread. Oh look. An American bittern!

who sleeked down when he saw a small fish.

Most of the dabbling ducks were in eclipse plumage in early November, but this drake American wigeon was impressing his mate with fully  molted raiment. He's ready to display.

And in flight. What a gorgeous sight. Oh, I would love to spread that wing and feel that velvet green speculum.

Ahh, crap. You're poopin' up my flight shot, Mr. Wigeon. Spoiled anyway by the hotel behind. This photo does convey the sharp contrast of wild and insanely built-up that is South Padre. Or any beach area, for that matter. Sigh. I see the wildlife crampacked into the tiny refuges and wonder what it must've been like before the giant hotels and condos and restaurants and tattoo parlors and beach towel/sunglasses stores crowded it all into pockets. Beaches. I love 'em. But coastal areas swiftly drive me nuts, because the balance is usually tilted toward all those giant things, and the throngs and their dopey thongs. Poo on that. We should leave more room for wildlife. Tear some of those buildings down and bring the marsh back where it once was and ought still to be.

Having vented, I'm deeply grateful for what remains around the Convention Center and the World Birding Center. I guess I'm just greedy for what used to and ought to be here. And will never understand how a row of sunglasses stores could have taken precedence over a vital breathing living nursery for fish, crustaceans, invertebrates, and birds. How many damn beach towel stores does one town need? In my mind I'd love to be a sort of Carrie Nation for beach development, busting in and swinging my ax around, riding a bulldozer in my big long flouncy dress.

 The pintails were looking a bit shabby by contrast to the wigeon, if such a graceful greyhound can ever look shabby.

The challenge as a photographer is to get the birds framed up in those golden moments before they fly across the facade of the hotel, the marina, the electrical tower. Bill of the Birds took these two roseate spoonbill shots. I forget why he had my camera in his hands but he responded beautifully to GIT 'IM GIT 'IM GIT 'IM which is what I hissed when the spoonbill took off.

 Ahhh. There you are. A million miles, visually, from Big Johnson's Bar. And just a couple of wingstrokes away.

Rarities

In North Dakota, I always see some things I've never seen before, and some things that are hard to see anywhere else. Nestled in the grass near where we saw both the displaying Sprague's pipit and the Baird's sparrow was a butterfly I was sure I'd never seen. One of the things I love about carring my camera everywhere is that I don't have to frantically scribble down obscure underwing markings and antenna knob color in my notebook. I just try to get the best picture I can and go about my merry way, keying it out when I get to a field guide. This is a Chryxus Arctic, Oeneis chryxus. I'm not sure I've ever seen an Arctic before, much less this one. Eastern birders count the American bittern among the rarest of the rare, but in North Dakota it's possible to see them both standing in the reeds by the roadside and in flight. If you look closely at these photos you can see the bittern's impossibly long green toes sticking out behind its tail. They're kind of Gollumesque birds. This one was being perforated by a red-winged blackbird as it made its way toward a slough.

Something you don't see very much in the East: a bull, walking down a country road toward a battery of birders.
He was much more interested in some heifers penned in the grove, and turned off before I had to get out my red cape and tri-cornered hat. Tracks showed that he'd been wandering up and down the road for quite some time.

Abandoned houses are increasingly rare where we live, thanks to people's propensity for simply knocking or burning them down. I love abandoned houses, love to poke around in them and look for signs of the lives they once sheltered. Bill of the Birds is very spooky but he ventured a peek in this one. He has his neck warmer pulled up as a kind of stovepipe hat; it was that cold. Oz never did give nothin' to the Tinman.
Outside was an old buckboard wagon. I wondered how long all this had stood on the prairie, covered by snow and battered by the incessant wind. It was freezing, even in June, on this drizzly day.Abandoned buidings are everywhere out here, each one lonelier and more evocative than the last. This one might have been a schoolhouse, with sturdy little blonde kids inside.
But the rarest of the rare came over the phone as we were birding our way back to Carrington after a long day in Kidder County. Three whooping cranes had been reported from a farm section that was about ten miles from nowhere. We swooped in and spotted them without any problem. It's hard to miss four-foot-high white birds on a muddy field.I am not proud of this photo, but we were almost a mile away, and even at that the cranes were nervous about us--walking away. We dared not press them. Because nothing goes unnoticed for long, even in the middle of nowhere, a truck soon rolled up. Inside was a landowner who had been watching over the birds for more than a week. He had been quiet about them, realizing that they were vanishingly rare and worthy of protection.

It was nice to know they'd had a good week's rest, especially when a car with three clued-in birders appeared on the horizon and drove perhaps a half-mile over the prairie directly toward the birds. The birders got out, bristling with scopes and telephoto lenses, and put them to wing, apparently for good. We were too far away to hail them or to do anything more than shake our heads in bewilderment at the intrusion. It was especially embarrassing given that the landowner had been so gracious to us. The cranes weren't seen again. There were a lot of disappointed birders at the festival for whom whooping crane would have been a life bird.

Asking around with USFWS personnel and checking listservs soon revealed that the three birds were one-year-old males that were led south via an ultralight aircraft from their natal area in Wisconsin. According to Tom Stehn, Whooping Crane Coordinator at Aransas NWR, they returned to central Wisconsin this spring just as researchers had hoped, then (naughty birds) took off for North Dakota. These are the things that radios and color bands tell us. If there's a silver lining to this story, it's probably a good thing that the cranes, imprinted as they are on an ultralight aircraft, still retain such a healthy and well-founded suspicion of people. It's tough to be a tall, white bird that everyone wants a piece of. They're the Brangelinas of the bird world, and they don't like the paparazzi, either.