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September 22, 2007
This year’s annual Hawk Watch trip to Smith Point was a great one. Fourteen participants enjoyed a rather pleasant late September day with clear skies and winds out of the north (good for big raptor movements). After arriving we birded along Hawkins Camp Road since it was not warm enough for the thermals to develop that the hawks need to kettle. Hawkins Camp Road was fairly birdy with us finding our first hawk an immature Red-shouldered Hawk right of the bat, which coincidentally led us to finding the Couch's Kingbird pair that have been seen along Hawkins Camp Road the last couple of years. They were not happy with the presence of the Red-shouldered Hawk and they were making that fact known. Hawkins Camp Road has been one of the few reliable locations to find Couch's Kingbirds on the Upper Texas Coast. While watching the Couch's Kingbirds we had several immature Mississippi Kites, Sharp-shinned Hawks and Broad-winged Hawks glide low over us affording us great looks at all the markings on their undersides. We also found and got good looks at a Least Flycatcher in the same area. After pulling ourselves away from the hawks and the kingbirds we continued to make our way to the point when we passed a sod field that the participants in my car saw a few birds in that they didn't recognize. So we stopped to check out the birds in the field while the rest of the group went on ahead. We discovered that the birds in the field were Killdeer and while looking through the Killdeer we found two other birds that were slightly smaller and more slender then the Killdeer. They were two Buff-breasted Sandpiper, a rare migrant at this time of year. I was able to get the scope on them to give the participants in my car good fairly close looks at them. We decided that we would for go catching up with the rest of the group at the point and keep track of the sandpipers. So we could show them to the rest of the group when they came back. The sandpipers did hang around and all participants were able to get good looks at them. I believe it was a life bird for most of the participants. The group that made it to the point reported that they encountered nothing out of the ordinary but did get good looks at several American Oystercatchers. We watched the sandpipers until it was time to get back to the hawk watch tower.
We got back to the hawk watch tower around 10:30 thinking that it had warmed up enough for thermals to form and that we would be in for a good day for large numbers of Broad-winged Hawks migrating through the area with the good winds out of the north. However, it was not to be but that did not dampen the day as we made up for the lack of large numbers of hawks by getting close looks at the hawks we did see. They were low enough that you could see all the markings clearly. I believe by the end of the trip most of the participants were getting more confident with identifying raptors on the wing. The raptors that we saw were Red-shouldered Hawk (immature), Broad-winged Hawks (mature and immature), Mississippi Kites (immature), Cooper's Hawks (immature), Sharp-shinned Hawks (immature), American Kestrel (mature) and Northern Harrier (mature). A big thanks goes to John Arvin for doing a wonderful job leading this trip. I hope everybody had as good of a time as I did and enjoyed the birds we saw. Overall we saw about 40 species for the morning.
Bird List
~ Adam Wood, OG Field Trip Coordinator, birdsondabrain@earthlink.net, 713-515-1692 |
