I spent the day at Corpus Christi birding hotspots, including the famous Blucher Park, the Packery Channel, and of course Paradise Pond in Port Aransas. It is a wonderful place to be during the peak of the bird migration! Here is a Canada Warbler.
I was surprised to learn that the Great Kiskadee is common here!
This is my first view of a Cooper's Hawk nest...
if you look close you can see one sitting on the nest.
This beautiful guy is a great crested flycatcher.
I enjoyed seeing the Golden fronted Woopecker.
There were lots of wildflowers so there were many great butterflies too. This is a cooperative Pipevine Swallowtail.
Black and White Warblers were still around.
Another great bird for this area is the Couch's Kingbird.
Sure enjoyed the flowers!
This is the Great Southern White Butterfly, also enjoying the flowers!
You could hardly call yourself a birder if you didn't visit a sewage pond or two to check out the birds, and back in Port Aransas these Redheads were in the new birding center (aka flooded area around the sewage treatment plant)!
They built a boardwalk here and you can walk up pretty close to some great birds, including White Pelicans dwarfing the tiny Sanderlings.
The Dunlin have their black bottoms already, as they will be leaving soon to breed in the far north.
Look at the brightly colored Ruddy Turnstone, and a Gull Billed Tern.
More Ruddy Turnstones!
This is the most beautiful Stilt Sandpiper I have ever seen!
lots of Ruddy Ducks!
The Black Necked Stilt is really one of my top 5 favorite birds, I just think they are cute.
These Orange Crowned Warblers were feasting on bugs in the Mulberry tree.
Along the Island you could still find the Black Bellied Plovers.
Sandwich terns were diving for fish.
Whimbrels were not too hard to find either.
Looks like a Wilson's Plover.
The Great Tailed Grackle are common but really are neat looking.
This is a Mexican Mallard pair.
Another flycatcher, this time the Yellow bellied Flycatcher.
And the Eastern Kingbirds are back!
This one looks like an Eastern Wood Pewee.
This is actually a white-morf Reddish Egret. No one knows why about 10% of the birds are white with the pink bill.
I think this one is a Royal Tern.
Boy, the Tri colored Heron will disappear when it turns sideways!
This big guy is the Caspian Tern, he has the black tipped bill.
These Black Throated Green Warblers are so beautiful!
Looks like a Tennessee Warbler.
This is a female Blue Grosbeak bathing at Paradise Pond.
There were lots of Orioles around, here is a beautiful male orchard oriole,
a female Baltimore Oriole,
and a male Baltimore Oriole (top) with a female Orchard Oriole.
Day 2 - off to a 7000 acre ranch! Here is the welcoming committee, cross the cattle guard (aka moat) and hear the gators roar!
We walked through some beautiful country, made even more so by the beautiful Magnolia Warbler's Song.
This is going to be a really big deer
I will post the rest of the photos from Day Two next week.
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