Brazoria County Birding (and 300th Lifer!)

As what usually happens, my plans change once I get out in the field. My original plan was to drive down to Brazoria NWR and then head up to Brazos Bend SP and call it a night. Instead, I stayed the night in Galveston, then drove along the Brazoria County shoreline to Freeport, then hit the Brazoria NWR and went home and played Wii.

One of the fatal flaws in my planning (that prompted the change), in trying to boost my county 100s, is that the only time I've been to Brazoria County was November 10th, 2006. The same time of year to the very day that I was going out today. When I'm trying to get new species, it doesn't make much sense to [only] go to the same place at the same time of year. So I didn't. Since I didn't have any shorebirds, we spent a good deal of time on the shore.

Right before we got to the shore, we saw a pond filled with more Black-crowned Night-Herons than I'd ever seen collectively my entire life. It was quite an amazing sight.

There were a million of these little guys:

Sanderling, the cutest bird on the face of the planet. I don't know what this guy was poking at, but I wasn't about to find out! I apologize for the photo quality, I forgot to take it off ISO 1600 from when I was playing with my camera the night before. We also saw scores of Piping Plovers with a few Snowy Plovers, Black-bellied Plovers and Semipalmated Plovers inbetween. I really need to come back here in the summertime. Most of our shorebirds have already left for the winter. But I was happy to nab every common UTC shorebird for my county list.

At Brazoria NWR, the most notable experience was when we were driving up the dirt path to the visitor's center, we saw a cluster of birds in one of the drainage ditches. I stopped the car way back to look at them and it was a collection of White Ibises, Long-billed Dowitchers, and Great White Egrets. But that was the normal part. The odd part is that there were two Crested Caracaras, on the ground, one on each side of the group about a foot away from them. It was almost like they were rounding them up for dinner! Unfortunately, a park ranger and sheriff's deputy breezed past and scared them off before I could get a decent photograph (and luckily gave me a chance to identify the dowitchers by flight call).

The next exciting thing was finding this American Alligator on the boardwalk. The lady at the visitor's center said there was a 15-footer down the road! I also was just in time to see my 300th life bird, an American Bittern, fly away! Now it's time to start working on that magic number 400 (for no other reason that it's next).

We stopped in Alvin to look for parking-lot birds for the list (Pigeon, House Sparrow, and other Doves), but couldn't find any! I'm guessing, because it just rained and it was the afternoon, they were all taking siestas!

At the end of the day, I had 22 new species (to 62 total) for Brazoria County and was that much closer to getting 100. Brazoria County now holds the third highest number of species for me.