North on the Wing

by Bruce M. Beehler

  Christopher Columbus and other early explorers traversing the Gulf of Mexico noted the passage of land birds far from shore in spring and fall, but no naturalist took such comments as proof of a trans-Gulf migration route for several centuries. In the 1940s, George Lowery, of Louisiana State University, was the first to argue that songbirds actually do cross the Gulf in migration, but prominent naysayers ridiculed his hypothesis. Lowery worked in the Yucatán at night, using a telescope to spot the dark shapes of birds crossing the face of the full moon on their way northward. Large numbers of songbirds, he discovered, were making the trans-Gulf spring crossing. Those few ornithologists and birders along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana who had witnessed spring fall-outs in Louisiana were convinced by Lowery’s reports, but others doubted that such small birds could fly so long without rest and food.

  Sidney Gauthreaux, one of Lowery’s graduate students at LSU, used pioneering nighttime radar studies in the 1960s to confirm that, yes, indeed, birds migrate north across the Gulf in numbers, often high in the sky. Most recently, with the aid of ever-better weather radar technology, Gauthreaux has provided strong baseline evidence that the number of songbird migrants crossing the Gulf has declined substantially during the forty years he has been conducting this work. As I traveled northward, I would learn from various experts about the complex causes of the migrants’ decline, which are not related to the rigors of their Gulf crossing.

  On my first morning at High Island, I bike to the Houston Audubon Society’s Boy Scout Woods reserve to purchase an entry badge. Near the registration desk, a solitary male Hooded Warbler, in bold yellow and black, gaily bathes in a shallow bird bath beneath an artificial water drip. Facing the bath is a small grandstand occupied by about a dozen birders who tote binoculars, field guides, and digital SLR cameras fitted with telephoto lenses. Most High Island woodlands feature such drips—and nearby observer benches—to attract migrant songbirds to drink and bathe, and, in turn, to draw groups of birders.

  Neotropical migrants were scarce at Boy Scout Woods that first morning, though plenty of local resident birds were in full voice. Still early in the migration season, the weather had not forced many northbound migrants down into these coastal woods; indeed, the little woodland patches of High Island are often migrant-free early in the season. On the other hand, during peak high season, around April 20, a birder does not need a fall-out to enjoy a day of birding far superior to any back at home in Indiana or Maryland; some percentage of the migrating birds always drops into the coastal reserves instead of continuing inland.

  For those used to Mid-Atlantic birding, the remarkable thing about the arrival of songbirds along the Gulf Coast is that it takes place in the afternoon, not in the predawn hours. A woodland silent at 9 a.m. or 1 p.m. might start swarming with birds at 4 p.m., and birders can experience first-hand the phantomlike arrival of the migrants over the water in full daylight. Today’s smart phones and sophisticated weather-tracking technology give birders tools to communicate among themselves and predict where birds will show up, but pinpointing arrivals of big numbers of migrants on the coast remains the realm of guesswork. Birders must venture out to see for themselves what has come in from the Gulf.

  SONGBIRD WOODS

  A few days later, I visited High Island’s Smith Oaks Sanctuary, with songbirds aplenty despite the absence of fall-out. The afternoon show began in the parking lot, where a small mulberry tree in full fruit was the target of two long-lensed photographers capturing shots of an array of migrant songbirds. Several Rose-breasted Grosbeaks ate with gusto, finding the purple berries irresistible; the adult males, which had wintered in a Central American forest, sported a rosy bib against a white breast and belly, harlequin black-and-white upper parts, and a big, triangular pinkish-white bill. On its breeding grounds in the hardwood forests of the Northeast, this grosbeak is a shy canopy dweller, heard but rarely seen, but here one could stand on the lot’s grassy verge within fifteen feet of the birds as they foraged in the small mulberry at eye level. Also gorging in the mulberry were a male Orchard Oriole (black and chestnut), a male Baltimore Oriole (black, white, and fiery orange), several male Summer Tanagers (orange-red, with a yellow bill), a male Scarlet Tanager (deep red, with black wings and tail), and several Cedar Waxwings (tan and black-masked, with red and yellow highlighting on wings and tail). Here were five of the most colorful songbirds in North America—all in a twenty-foot mulberry tree by a crowded parking lot.

  I was joined by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department ornithologist Cliff Shackelford and his wife, Julie, director of Texas programs for the Conservation Fund (a nongovernmental organization similar to the Nature Conservancy). Both have devoted their lives to the protection of natural habitat for Texas’s birds and other wildlife; effective nature conservation, here as elsewhere, is driven by productive, can-do people such as the Shackelfords, who bird every chance they get when they’re not working. Julie told me that the Conservation Fund had just helped purchase the Powderhorn Ranch—five thousand acres of remnant coastal prairie adjacent to Mad Island—thus substantially expanding the protected coastal prairie facing Matagorda Bay.

  Rose-breasted Grosbeak

  In the oak woods, crisscrossed with winding and shadowy trails, we observed fifteen species of passage migrant wood warblers—Cliff’s favorite birds and my quest group—over a ninety-minute period. A Black-and-white Warbler crept up a sloping branch, acting like a nuthatch. Below it, an Ovenbird searched fallen leaves on the ground for insect prey. High in the leafy branches of a big old Live Oak crept several warblers—a Northern Parula (diminutive but colorful), a Black-throated Green Warbler (with a black throat patch and yellow face), a Blackburnian Warbler (with a deep-orange throat that seemed to glow), and a male Blackpoll Warbler (patterned a bit like a chickadee, but with yellow legs). Seeing the warblers as they foraged high in the leaves was no easy task. Clumps of birders stood about, helping one another pinpoint the different species and speaking in quiet tones as they compared notes and asked about the whereabouts of certain target species (“Anybody seen a Goldenwing?”).

  The silence of the passage migrants made them difficult to locate. Because wood warblers are, of course, famed for their singing ability, it was a major surprise to learn that here in Texas, northbound passage migrant warblers only rarely, if ever, sing. Instead, in the High Island oak woods, local residents—Gray Catbirds and Carolina Wrens—gave voice. Another surprise for a first-time birder in the High Island woodlots was that the warblers, arriving in the afternoon, mostly disappeared northward after a stopover of a just few hours. By contrast, in the Mid-Atlantic environs, where I had done most of my birding, migrants tended to stay two or three days in a patch of woods before undertaking their next flight northward. On High Island, birds dropped in to feed and bathe but flew off northward shortly after darkness fell, in a rush to reach more productive bottomland forest in the interior.

  The warblers at Smith Oaks this afternoon were all passage migrants—fun to see and good practice for the days to come, but they didn’t count toward my warbler quest. So far, I had racked up only one warbler species on its breeding habitat: the Common Yellowthroat, which I had observed at Mad Island on its nesting territory. One down. Thirty-six to go.

  CONSERVATION AND RESEARCH EFFORTS

  Smith Oaks and Boy Scout Woods form the epicenter of birding on High Island. Owned and managed by the Houston Audubon Society, these two adjacent preserves exemplify the best in volunteerism and private philanthropy on behalf of nature. Based in Houston and citizen-led, the Houston Audubon Society has established seventeen bird sanctuaries in the greater Houston–Galveston area since its founding in 1969, including several woodland sanctuaries on High Island. Houston Audubon’s regional network encompasses more than three thousand acres protected for birds, including Bolivar Flats, southwest of High Island and famed for its beach birds.

  Houston Audubon’s High Island sanctuaries are operated entirely by volunteers, most of whom drive daily from
their homes in Houston to help out. They manage a visitor center, provide information and guidance to the approximately ten thousand nature-loving visitors who come each year, and maintain the properties and their trails, buildings, blinds, drips, and observation platforms. In 2015, a hundred volunteers donated forty-five hundred hours of their time. The sanctuaries were initiated with a purchase of just four acres by this Audubon Society in 1984, and subsequent purchases and donations by citizens and Amoco Production Company have expanded the properties to their current size—a big deal for birdwatching, bird education, and bird conservation, and all of it powered by local volunteers.

  Hundreds of citizens’ organizations throughout America, including this one, promote conservation, education, and nature study, making life better for migratory birds and more interesting for local people. Yet they are just one type among numerous institutions working on behalf of migratory birds and their habitats. Citizens’ groups such as Houston Audubon, state agencies such as the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, nongovernmental conservation organizations such as the Nature Conservancy, corporations such as Amoco Production Company, and statutory research entities such as the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center form part of the picture, but in my journey I also saw the contributions of federal agencies and universities as well as those of national wildlife refuges and state parks, along with intriguing partnerships between citizen groups and corporations that are yielding substantial conservation successes.

  Late one day, I drive to the landward side of High Island, returning to Smith Oaks Sanctuary. I stop in a dirt parking lot surrounded by low woods and packed with late-model cars sporting window stickers pledging allegiance to diverse birding and nature organizations. With camera and long lens in hand, I follow trail signs to the sanctuary’s waterbird rookery, situated on a narrow island in Clay Bottom Pond. Before I take many steps, I hear the cacophony of long-legged waders in full breeding mode.

  Amoco Production Company donated Clay Bottom Pond and its enclosed island to Houston Audubon in 1994. Both are artificial, the products of industrial activity as well as water management for High Island. When Audubon took ownership, there was no waterbird rookery here, but after a year of habitat restoration and protection, herons showed up. By 1995, fifty pairs of herons nested on the island. By 1998, thirteen thousand birds of various species used the island as a roost. If anything exemplifies the impact of smart conservation planning and action, it is the creation of this safe space for large waterbirds. Set aside appropriate habitat, protect it well, and the wildlife will come.

  Houston Audubon constructed a series of observation platforms on the far side of the narrow water passage opposite the nesting island; patrolled by alligators, the passage keeps out pesky predators such as raccoons and opossums, which might consume the eggs of breeding waterbirds. I spent the next hour, with the sun dropping toward the horizon behind me, gazing in amazement and shooting photographs of the crazy commotion on the island. Scores of Great Egrets, Snowy Egrets, Roseate Spoonbills, and Neotropic Cormorants were scattered over the island; big, brightly colored birds were everywhere, some posing, some carrying sticks for nests, some marching about. Pairs courted, and some birds challenged each other in a swirl of nest construction, territorial aggression, display, and sex.

  The Great Egrets in particular were stupendous. One male, a lanky and graceful large white bird, raised the gauzy plumes (or aigrettes) on its back and flanks into a wispy tutu and, as its luminous feathers waved in the breeze, snaked its neck up over its back, pointing its beak skyward and then bringing it forward and downward in a long bow. Carried only during the breeding season, a male’s aigrettes are the height of refined and filmy beauty. The delicate, snowy plumes, glowing in the sunlight, looked much like those of a bird of paradise; not surprisingly, fashionable women lusted after these feathers for ornamenting their oversized hats back in the 1890s.

  Second in abundance to the Great Egrets were the Roseate Spoonbills. Today they were busy fighting for mates, which they did by dueling with their absurd-looking spatulate bills and waving their pink wings. As they battled, they showed off bright patches of color: an all-white neck; all-pink wings; red flashes on the shoulder, rump, and undertail; and rich ochre at the base of the wing and on the tail. The pale, creamy-green skin of the spoonbill’s bald crown, its orange eyes, and its dark-pink legs all added to the extreme effect. The birds, wildly colored and strange-looking, were gorgeous but also slightly grotesque, more striking than beautiful. Roseate Spoonbills are graceful on the wing, but when a pair battles for a nest site or a female, they’re like two clowns going at it in a circus.

  It is shocking to think that in the year 1900, the U.S. populations of both the egret and the spoonbill were virtually exterminated by the commercial plume trade. Frank Chapman wrote in 1904 of the situation in Florida: “I have heard a ‘plume hunter’ boast of killing three hundred herons in a ‘rookery’ in one afternoon. Another proudly stated that he and his companions had killed one hundred thirty thousand birds—herons, egrets, and terns—during one winter.”

  Today, because of the good work of organizations such as Houston Audubon and the largesse of corporations such as Amoco Production Company, birders may take the spectacle of waterbird abundance for granted. But if we go back 110 years, things would look quite different. The National Audubon Society was founded in 1905 in large part to address a national crisis: long-legged wading birds (herons, egrets, spoonbills, ibis, and others) were overhunted, mainly to adorn those oversized hats for the fashion-conscious. At the same time, broad-scale and unregulated market hunting of all manner of “game birds” was leading to the disappearance of populations of ducks, geese, swans, shorebirds, and even some songbirds. During this period, the Carolina Parakeet and Passenger Pigeon faded into extinction, mainly because of unrestrained year-round shooting. At the end of the nineteenth century, everything was fair game, not only birds: the Bison was nearly extinct, and hunters all but exterminated White-tailed Deer and Wild Turkey from the remnant forests of the East. Market hunting and the extensive deforestation that took place during and after the Civil War were a one-two punch that reduced wildlife to a shadow of what it had been when the Pilgrims arrived on these shores.

  At the eleventh hour, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and George Bird Grinnell spoke out on behalf of protection for threatened species, as well as land conservation, and they founded the Boone & Crockett Club, Sierra Club, and Audubon Society. The last of these focused initially on protecting birds of all sorts through the creation of sanctuaries as well as passage of local and federal laws protecting birds and making the commercial sale of migratory birds illegal. Market hunting and plume collecting were fully banned by 1920, but decades passed before the deeply depressed populations of many species rebounded to the levels we appreciate today. It is remarkable to report that many bird populations—especially waterbirds and raptors—are in better shape today than at any time in the past century. Thanks are due to effective legislation, the creation of sanctuaries, and the natural regeneration of forests on unproductive lands that were abandoned by family subsistence farming in the early decades of the twentieth century.

  BIRDS OF ESTUARY AND BEACH

  The next morning I turn my energies toward meeting friendly birders, introducing myself to the volunteers who operate the Houston Audubon Society visitor center at Boy Scout Woods. Running into three young leaders of Tropical Birding, a nature-tour group, I learn they lead free bird walks each weekday, and I join them on a trip to the coast. Fifteen of us, plus the guides, caravan to Rollover Pass on the Bolivar Peninsula, nine miles southwest of High Island. Here a small bridge spans a narrow outlet draining Rollover Bay into the Gulf of Mexico. Just north of the bridge is a sandy access road to the bay and, depending on the tide, an abundance of sand flats that attract myriad waterbirds during the late winter and early spring. The guides quickly set spotting scopes on tripods and begin pointing out bird species to the birders—some novices, others exp
erienced, but virtually all of us fifty-five or older. For many of us, recently arrived from the wintry North, this is birding nirvana.

  Although the woods of High Island were quiet, the flats swarmed with waterbirds. Eight species of terns rested nearby in flocks or foraged for tiny fish in the shallow bay: Least Tern, Black Tern, Common Tern, Forster’s Tern, Gull-billed Tern, Sandwich Tern, Royal Tern, and Caspian Tern. I had seen all of these species at one time or another, but I had never seen the whole lot all at once and all together. In addition, an impressive group of sandpipers and waders assembled on the flats: American Oystercatcher, American Avocet, Black-necked Stilt, Willet, Long-billed Curlew, Marbled Godwit, and a half-dozen smaller species. Five plover species hunted the flats with their distinct stop-and-start gait: Black-bellied, Wilson’s, Semipalmated, Piping, and Snowy. A hundred Roseate Spoonbills and several Reddish Egrets added to a scene that was much like watching the color plates of a North American birding field guide come to life before us.

  Not only were there birds in dense profusion, but many perched right at the edge of the water or in the shallows at close range. Long lenses were drawn and close-ups of all sorts of accommodating waterbirds were rapidly uploaded to storage media of expensive digital SLR cameras. The birders of our little group—many of whom were adding new species to their life lists—quietly uttered a sort of ecstatic gibberish as they moved from one handsome bird to another.

  Most remarkably, Rollover Pass is not a reserve of any kind. It is just a particularly fertile estuary where many kinds of habitats converge: seashore, tidal pass, sandflat, and marshland. That said, the profusion of birds here is a result of the nearby array of protected areas scattered in almost every direction. This section of coastal Texas is rich in conservation green spaces, and the birds that breed and roost at night in these areas visit Rollover Pass when the tides produce good meals.