by Ian Harding
On rare occasions, a strong storm out of the north will coincide with a wave of neotropical migrants flying up over the Gulf. When this happens, birds will come in to land at High Island en masse. It’s called a “fallout.” Every limb of every tree—and even the ground—is littered with tired birds: warblers, vireos, orioles, tanagers, buntings. All the stunning small birds that pass through ever year but you never see.
And you can’t see these birds in such concentrated numbers anywhere else, ever.
All of this is why High Island is a Mecca for bird lovers. Why it’s talked about with a kind of hushed reverence—the way your drunk uncle talks about Woodstock. You had to have been there, man.
* * *
I booked the trip to Houston for mid-April. We had just started shooting season seven of Pretty Little Liars. I only ever know my shooting schedule a few days in advance, but I figured I could change the flight last-minute if there was a conflict.
I tried to cozy up to the producers, hoping they would let me know what my schedule was for the rest of the month. But they didn’t know the schedule, either.
The whole process of making the show comes down to the wire every week. I usually don’t learn my lines until the day before we shoot. It’s not that I don’t want to: I can’t. Script rewrites happen up until the very last minute, and the head writer on each episode is always on set in case any last-minute rewrites or script changes are necessary. There’s an elegant chaos to it all.
I was getting increasingly giddy about the trip, and anxious to get going. It was distracting me from my work. During breaks from shooting, I’d even started studying bird flashcards.
Tyler Blackburn—who plays Caleb Rivers on the show—came up to me one day while I was running through the cards and asked what I was doing. I told him about the trip. He asked when I was going, and I told him the second-to-last week in April, right at the height of the migration.
“So, you’re going to High Island for four-twenty?” he asked.
“Yeah, why?”
Tyler grinned mischievously.
“High Island … four-twenty…”
“It’s not like that, man. It’s for the birds!”
Not surprisingly, there were last-minute schedule changes, so I had to push the trip back a week. And then I had to push it back again.
My personal and work lives were at an impasse. It looked less and less likely that I would even get to go.
By the time I actually got on the plane at LAX, it was the second week of May. It was cutting it close—the migration was winding down—but I had to go.
In the seat to the left of me was my buddy John. He was in the class below mine at Carnegie, and we’ve been friends for years. When he was a freshman, he used my home address for his fake ID. To my right was Walter, the guy I’d seen the hooded merganser with at Big Bear. I’d convinced them to tag along. They’re both writers, so they can work from just about anywhere.
Sitting on the plane, I was excited. I couldn’t contain myself. The small child sitting in the row in front of me kept turning around to glare at my bouncing knee, which was shaking his chair. We hadn’t even taken off yet, and I was already vibrating with glee.
“It’s okay, dude. I don’t like to fly either,” Walter said to me, his face a little pale.
“You seem pretty calm,” I said.
“Oh, good,” he replied. “I’m not.” He closed his eyes like he was going to take a nap.
John was straddling an overstuffed backpack. He kept rooting around in it and pulling out snack-sized packages of peanut M&M’s.
“John, did you bring anything besides candy?”
“Of course I did,” he said.
“What do you have that’s not candy?” Walter asked, his eyes still shut.
“Let’s find out,” John said, reaching into his backpack. He pulled out a king-sized package of Skittles, a gallon freezer bag filled with candy corn, and a tray of Oreos. Finally, he held up a can of Pringles. “See? I’ve got chips, too.”
John is fit, yet has the diet of a hummingbird. He consumes more sugar than should be legal yet still manages to look like a college soccer player.
Walter also looks collegiately athletic, though this is achieved through what he calls “old Russian man workouts”—twenty minutes on the stationary bike, forty in the sauna—and surfing.
This was also not Walter’s first trip to High Island, so he knew what we were in for.
As we pushed back from the jet bridge, Walter leaned forward and looked out the window.
“High Island is one of my favorite places on earth,” he said. “If we get lucky, the trees will be filled with birds—like Christmas ornaments.”
He leaned back into his seat and closed his eyes again. I couldn’t wait to see it myself.
I pulled out a magazine I’d picked up at the terminal. It had caught my eye as I passed a newsstand. I don’t normally buy Cosmopolitan, but this one had my costar Shay Mitchell on the cover—and there was an article about a beach body diet that said I could eat all the pizza I wanted, so I had to learn more about that.
John leaned over, looking at my reading material. “And you’re giving me shit for bringing candy?”
* * *
It was dark when we got into Houston. Just past 9:00 P.M. We waited for our bags at baggage claim—something syrupy was leaking out of John’s suitcase onto the carousel. He grabbed the bag, and told us to ignore it. We didn’t press the issue.
Bags collected, we rode the rent-a-car shuttle to the offsite lot. When I’d made a reservation for the car, I’d looked online to find a good price, and a certain vehicle had caught my eye. I hadn’t told the guys about it yet—they were in for a surprise.
We all gathered around the vehicle in the lot. It glowed a ghostly white in the darkness.
The minivan’s siren song was impossible to resist—for some. Walter was thrilled by the choice of vehicle. John, however, had serious concerns that we would look like a gang of bird-loving pedophiles. That didn’t bother me. If you put the two parts of my life together, that’s what I am.
Walter and I rock-paper-scissored to see who’d be driving—John claimed the entire back row for himself—and then I drove us away from the airport toward the hustle and bustle of the Houston suburbs.
We stopped on our way into town for bratwurst at a late-night beer garden just east of downtown. It was a shack in the middle of an otherwise vacant lot, with wooden picnic tables and strands of lights strewn between the trees.
Walter was back by the car. I glanced over to see him shielding his eyes, staring up into the inky darkness.
Dipping and looping overhead was a common nighthawk. Its long, thin wings flapped erratically. It called: a two-tone electronic chirp. Then it vanished into the dark.
“I used to see those after our high school football games,” John said, following my gaze. “They’d fly around the stadium lights.”
“I didn’t know you played football,” I said.
“I was the mascot,” he said proudly.
“They fired him after one game,” Walter said, as he walked back over to join us.
Later, sitting at a picnic table, John put down his bratwurst and shook his head. “This is unbelievable. This modern world, you know? I can wake up in Los Angeles, go to work, meet my girlfriend for lunch, go home to discover that my dog’s eaten a condom, and still have time to travel across the country for bratwurst. All in one day. The magic of air travel, man.”
Walter and I stared at him.
“John, did your dog eat a—”
“You’re missing the point,” he interrupted. “The point is that we flew here. Just like those birds.”
He gestured upward. There weren’t any birds. The nighthawk was long gone. “All in one day, you know?”
* * *
The next morning, we woke up at 5:00 A.M. We wanted to get out to High Island close to sunrise, to see if we could catch any stragglers that had stayed overnight. And new b
irds often come in early.
We tried to make coffee at the hotel, but the machine was intimidatingly complex—figuring out which button was “on” was like solving the riddle of the Sphinx.
We stopped at a Starbucks for caffeine, then headed east out of town on I-10. It was the same highway I’d taken in the opposite direction on that cross-country drive from Florida to LA.
The week before, thunderstorm after thunderstorm had wreaked havoc across the region. Houston had flooded. Like take-a-canoe-to-work flooded—and there were still sandbags scattered along the sides of the highway. This rain was exactly what we wanted—thunderstorms equal good birds.
Eventually we turned off the I-10 and started heading south to the coast. The land was flat and swampy. There was agriculture and farmland. Oil pumps were scattered in loose clusters like oversized grasshoppers. We crossed over a bridge that rose high enough to allow tanker ships to pass by in the channel below, and then drove up into the small town of High Island.
By that point, the caffeine had hit. We were raring to go. We pulled up in front of a preserve called the Boy Scout Woods and jumped out of the minivan like a SWAT team. We speed-walked over to the entrance, then speed-walked back to the car when we realized how dense the cloud of mosquitoes following us was. We sprayed ourselves down with bug repellent the way teenage boys use Axe body spray and headed back to the entrance.
Across the street there were a few residential houses. Some of them trailer homes. Directly next to the preserve were more. We were, in fact, just a hundred yards or so from the main road through town.
We walked into the Boy Scout Woods through a gate in a chain-link fence, probably meant to keep out cats. House cats kill more than a billion birds a year in the United States. A billion—that’s not a typo.
It was basically an overgrown neighborhood park. One wrong turn and we’d end up in somebody’s backyard.
Just past the entrance, a set of wooden grandstands faced a small clearing. At the end of the clearing, a hose hung out of a tree, dripping water for birds to drink and bathe in. I’d seen pictures online of the grandstand filled with birders, all aiming their spotting scopes and binoculars at the drip.
But now, the grandstands were empty. There were only a few people poking around the woods, and nobody was seeing much.
It was still early. It was a Monday. I assumed the birds would pick up as the sun rose a little higher. Or maybe birds just hate Mondays.
Two hours went by and it was still slow. Walter seemed bummed by the low bird turnout, but I was excited. We saw a few different species of warbler: magnolia, black-throated green, and black-and-white. All new for me.
We hopped back into the car and drove over to the Smith Oaks, another preserve about a mile away.
There’s a large rookery there, and we happened upon a Japanese tour group all silently taking photos of the nesting egrets and roseate spoonbills. They were all glued to cameras on tripods with monstrous telephoto lenses.
I walked over to see what they were looking at, and the tree next to me moved. I had totally missed a guy decked out head to toe in camouflage standing on a limb right next to my head, and I nearly shit myself when he shifted position.
Farther down the path, we got a good view of a pair of snowy egrets. John perked up. He put his hands around his mouth and did a perfect imitation of their call. The birds looked around, trying to figure out where the sound had come from. I turned to him:
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“I was an egret for Animal Projects,” he said.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, man. What were you?”
“I was a jellyfish.”
“That makes sense.”
We walked through the woods near the rookery for another hour or so. I spotted a yellow-billed cuckoo—another new bird—slipping its way through the foliage at the top of a huge live oak tree, but it flew off before Walter or John could see it. Otherwise, it was very quiet. There might have been more birders than actual birds that day. And there weren’t many birders.
We stuck around for a few more hours anyway. We kept hoping a new wave of birds might arrive—but it never came. Eventually, we decided to call it quits and took the ferry to Galveston for a late lunch. On the way, we stopped to look at shorebirds on the beach, where I picked up a few more new species: black-bellied whistling duck, gull-billed tern, and magnificent frigatebird.
That night, John dragged us to a Dave & Buster’s. As we were standing around an air hockey table, drinking beer and scratching the mosquito bites on our arms, we discussed options for the next day. Walter and I were both in agreement that High Island would probably be a bust again. It turns out, it probably would have been a great place to visit on 4/20. Just not in mid-May. The birds, for the most part, were already farther north.
John took his eye off the puck—
“Guys! I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s go to the Space Center tomorrow!”
Walter scored on him. He turned to me. “What about trying to find the red-cockaded woodpecker?”
“They have those around here?” I asked.
John cut in: “They also have Space Centers around here!”
“They’re endangered,” Walter said. “But there’s a place not too far away where we can see them,” he said.
“Sold,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
* * *
Our destination the next morning was the W. G. Jones State Forest—one of the last places in Texas where you can still see the red-cockaded woodpecker. It was directly north of us, about an hour away.
We were on the road just as the sun was coming up.
At one point on the drive, I looked into the rearview mirror and saw John drinking a Red Bull. This was after we’d already stopped for coffee. I asked for a sip and took the can away from him. He was hyper enough already. He pulled another can out of his backpack and popped the tab.
He stared at me in the mirror, not breaking eye contact: “Don’t toy with me, Ian,” he said.
We were prepared to spend the morning deep in the woods, but W. G. Jones caught us by surprise. It really didn’t seem all that remote: like High Island, the forest was bordered by urban sprawl.
We turned off the highway into a dirt parking lot and hopped out of the minivan. It felt like we’d just arrived at a farm. There was a large ramshackle building with aluminum siding. Two men stood leaning against a tractor in work overalls.
Next to the building was a trail, and, not really knowing where else to go, we started walking down it. We quickly arrived at a fork, where a signpost indicated that one way was closed: DUE TO ENDANGERED SPECIES NESTING SEASON AND PRESSURES BEING PLACED ON HABITAT, THIS AREA IS CLOSED.
A pine warbler flew by our heads and landed on a branch over the trail in front of us. I pulled out my binoculars to get a closer look.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was John. He pointed up—
“Delta Airbus,” he said. The plane was coming in to land.
“Thanks, John,” I said.
We walked farther in. No woodpeckers yet.
The main reason that the red-cockaded woodpecker is endangered is that it has very specific habitat requirements: the birds can only live in mature longleaf pine forests with no undergrowth.
Want to know how you get a forest to not have undergrowth? Forest fires. The woodpeckers are susceptible to attacks from predators hiding in the understory, and without forest fires, that vegetation builds up.
For the past hundred years, logging has destroyed a lot of the birds’ habitat. But, ironically, so has forest fire prevention. The woodpeckers’ population has declined to one percent of its original size.
Even W. G. Jones State Forest has to be actively managed, which is what those buildings by the entrance were for. There are regularly prescribed burns to mimic what happens when a forest is struck by lightning and people aren’t around to put out the fire.
Habitat isn’t the woodpeckers’ only pecu
liarity. They live in big family groups, and they’re the only species of woodpecker to nest in living trees. It can take up to six years for them to carve out a nest—and the longest these birds have ever been recorded to live is twelve years. That’s like if you got a flat tire when you were eighteen and didn’t finish patching it until you were in your mid-fifties.
And then once they finish building a nest, they often don’t even get to live in it. They get bullied out of their homes all the time. Pileated woodpeckers will enlarge the entryway so it’s too big for the red-cockaded to live in anymore, and over two dozen other species of vertebrates have been documented stealing red-cockaded woodpecker nests. Even insects will live in the holes. The animal kingdom as a whole has decided to walk all over the red-cockaded woodpecker. It’s like the fall guy for the entire forest.
* * *
As we hiked on, I noticed that the trees were all evenly spaced. I later learned that this wasn’t a real old-growth forest—a hundred years ago the land had been a pine seedling nursery, and the trees we were walking through now had actually been planted during the Great Depression.
The woodpeckers had been attracted to the habitat, which just so happened to be the type of forest that stood here before the area was first logged. The birds were an unintended consequence of reseeding the forest.
Another unintended consequence: gay men. Until recently, the W. G. Jones State Forest has been a meet-up spot for gay men to have anonymous sex. The park rangers have struggled for decades to stop people from having sex in the woods and have closed the forest at times to try to curtail the activity.
Anyway, we were just looking for birds.
There was a buzzing in my ears again. I slapped myself in the face. Despite having brought enough DEET-based repellent to bring about the End Times for mosquitoes throughout the region, I was still getting eaten alive.
There were other sounds, too. We could hear the roar of the highway in the distance. Children were playing and yelling at each other in the backyards of the housing development that bordered the forest just a couple of hundred yards away from us. We could see rows of houses through the trees. A jackhammer started up—literally, a jackhammer—and police sirens wailed by.
