[texbirds] Travis County Big Day, May 6th - 151 species

From: Eric Carpenter <ecarpe@xxxxxxxxx>
To: texbirds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 7 May 2012 20:45:53 -0500
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Yesterday (Sunday, May 6th) was the 3rd annual Travis County Big Day
run for team "Every Which Way But Goose" which consists of Kenny
Anderson, Maggie Burnett, Paul Sunby and myself.  We strive to make
our run a few days earlier in the season to give ourselves a better
shot at lingering wintering birds, but partially due to busy
schedules, we thought we would try a later run that might hit closer
to the central Texas migration peak.  All in all, we were pleased with
how the day turned out and we were able to track down 151 species,
breaking the 150-species milestone for the 3rd year in row.

South winds and warm cloudless days have again typified the migration
period in the middle of the state so we had guarded expectations going
into the day.  We figured Sunday would be more of the same based on
the forecast when we tried to catch a few hours of sleep on Saturday
night.  Somehow the weatherman missed the line of house-shaking
thunderstorms moving southeast through Austin that woke me up around
1am and had us all a bit more excited & anxious to get the day
started. When we met up at 3.15am, our excitement of the cloud cover,
continuing light rain, swirling winds and spectacular sky-filling
lightning show was tempered a bit as we came to realize the difficulty
it was adding to our pre-dawn and early morning plans.  Species that
were normally quite vocal were painfully quiet.  We would defer 3 of
our 4 owl targets to the evening, had to scramble to knock out target
nightjars and found a few of the resident birds to be hunkered down
and hard to come by.  All the while, we didn't notice any signs that
the storm had any positive effect on our migrant searches as we saw no
indication of birds having been pushed down by the storms until we had
a small trickle mid-morning once we left the hill country.

Still, we've learned the secret to a Big Day is to press on and stay
on task.  We continued on, picking up a few birds here and there while
being faithful to our route & plans.  A vocalizing male Rose-breasted
Grosbeak was a bonus as was a spur-of-the-moment roadside stop that
yielded 2 exclusives for the day plus our first Anhinga.  We would end
up with 11 species of warblers for the day, though most all of them
were either singletons or perhaps a couple individuals that we ran
across at various stops.  It was finally at Hornsby Bend where we
reaped some positive by-product of the early morning storms.  The
water-levels at the ponds there have been sub-optimal for shorebird
migration this year but the storm had helped to neutralize this.  We
would end the day with 17 species of shorebirds, including perhaps
~400 Wilson's Phalaropes, 3 Willets and, my favorite for the day, as
many as 20 (!) Buff-breasted Sandpipers.

We hung on to the bitter end and by 9.15pm (a mere 18 hours after
starting!) had finally knocked out our troublesome owls.  Some needed
dinner and a small happy hour followed where we were lamenting a few
missed birds but mostly excited about our day - we found that we were
already discussing tweaks to the route for next year's effort.

-- 
Eric Carpenter
Austin
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[texbirds] Travis County Big Day, May 6th - 151 species

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