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billfromlaketravis

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I made the trek down the Hill of Life to (successfully!) chase the Swainson's warbler turned up a few days ago by Austin's teenage birding wunderkind. Not the flashiest of birds, but only Travis County's 3rd recors. It was singing its little heart out and I could hear it 5 minutes before I got to him. The hike back up with 20 lbs of baby strapped to my chest was fun. Nice little bow to wrap up spring migration.

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34 minutes ago, hookem2010 said:

I made the trek down the Hill of Life to (successfully!) chase the Swainson's warbler turned up a few days ago by Austin's teenage birding wunderkind. Not the flashiest of birds, but only Travis County's 3rd recors. It was singing its little heart out and I could hear it 5 minutes before I got to him. The hike back up with 20 lbs of baby strapped to my chest was fun. Nice little bow to wrap up spring migration.

All that work and no picture?

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Barred owls are awesome.

I thought I'd take one last stroll through my neighborhood park to look for lingering migrants. There was some decent activity, but nothing special. Decided on one last mini-loop through some trees and found my multi-year spring migrant nemesis black-billed cuckoo. These little bastards are rare to begin with this far west, but they're also secretive AF, so they only get reported once every year or two in WilCo. My awful attempt at a pic versus what they actually look like...

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My photo setup is pretty legit, so that's how I get all these sweet shots. Tie a large dog around my waist, push a generally impatient and uninterested baby in a stroller, then attempt to hold my phone up to my bins, producing a photo suggestive of something that could be a bird.

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A yellow-green vireo showed up near Lake Somerville. These turn up in the valley perhaps annually in very small numbers, but are scarce elsewhere in the United States. The baby and I successfully chased it this morning. It was the best kind of chase, with another person already there and on the bird so I didn't have to do any of the hard work. Didn't even try for a photo this time, but this is what it looks like. Quite similar to our locally breeding red-eyed vireo

In shitty bird news, congress is working to delist the lesser prairie chicken from the ESA just 6 months after it was added. It's ONLY lost 97% of its population in the last 60 years, so obviously this decision is based on firmly established science 😠

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32 minutes ago, hookem2010 said:

In shitty bird news, congress is working to delist the lesser prairie chicken from the ESA just 6 months after it was added. It's ONLY lost 97% of its population in the last 60 years, so obviously this decision is based on firmly established science

Ranchers pushing back or what?

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I'm not positive if ranchers or drillers are the bigger issue in this particular case. Pretty much all the grouse-like species of the central and western grasslands are completely boned if conservation measures aren't substantially stepped up.

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On 5/13/2023 at 7:45 AM, hookem2010 said:

There's a brown pelican hanging out at Town Lake where Waller Creek dumps into it. I haven't seen it yet, but they hardly ever range inland and there are only a couple of records from the county, so a very cool find.

I know a guy who was, stress was, a catfish farmer.  His pond was about 20 miles inland in Brazoria County.  After several years of success, pelicans found his farm and a neighbor’s farm.  They ate every last one of the catfish.  He said they came in like a squadron of Japanese zeros.  The neighbor spent some time in the big house after shooting a few trying to protect his inventory. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Give me an idea of what these 6PM acrobats are swooping down to catch a bill full of water from the pool on the fly. I'd say nighthawks but nighthawks are mottled or stripedy. These guys are toast colored on the breast and belly and black or dark brown on the back. They move and dart so fast I can't get a picture. I mean unbelievably fast and agile. They can dart 4 different directions in a second. They'll group up and run off a buzzard.   

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Barn swallows? They've got a deeply forked tail, dark blue back and rusty underparts. They seem to me like more acrobatic fliers even when compared to other swallows. Certainly smaller than nighthawk, but lots of small birds will harass larger ones. And they will definitely swoop down to drink from pools.

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The next day hiking around his place I saw this baby vulture under a rock outcrop.  It showed signs of having been there a while and was being fed.  We saw the parents fly in and out of the area the day before.  It made this eerie hissing moaning noise at me.  When I first saw it I thought it might be an owl but it turned towards me and saw its head.

 

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We usually have a family of Screech Owls in our back yard.  Last year they had 3 babies and all 5 would fly though our yard and roost in our large oak looking for prey as the littles learned to hunt.The tree picture is a Hawk roosting where the Owls like to sit.  It’s usually too dark to capture the owls but one night I got an owl sitting on a cooler lid.

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I mentioned to my wife the other day that I wondered why none of the scores of birds that visit our feeders ever seem to get fat.

This morning, there were a bunch of red crossbills at a feeder and one female on the ground beneath the feeder. She was so fat that she few off like an overloaded bomber on the Doolittle Raid while the others few off vertically and effortlessly.

I guess my initial assertion was wrong.

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1 hour ago, hookem2010 said:

Not super familiar with hawks doing this a bunch. Mockingbirds certainly do, and in Australia, magpies will really fuck your shit up.

Yeah, I've gotten dive bombed by a mockingbird before.  Seems like a hawk would be a little more concerning.

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16 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

There was a story on the news this morning that a hawk in south Austin has been attacking people who go near its nest.  We've got a pair of hawks in my neighborhood right now and they are super chill.  How common is this?

We have a cordilleran flycatcher nest by our patio. They were frequently dive bombing us, and we thought it was because we were too close to the nest. Then, one day, a fly landed on my calf and I was slowly moving my hand over to swat it when one of the flycatchers flashed by and grabbed the fly right off my leg, making no contact with my skin. We began to notice that what they were doing was picking off insects that were hovering near us.

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The booby I had mentioned above sadly didn't last a week here before it was found dead. One of the bittersweet aspects of chasing rarities is that some injury or illness may have forced them out of their normal range, or even if healthy, they may never make it back to an area with others of their species, ending their chances of breeding.

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5 minutes ago, ImissWallyPryor said:

We have a cordilleran flycatcher nest by our patio. They were frequently dive bombing us, and we thought it was because we were too close to the nest. Then, one day, a fly landed on my calf and I was slowly moving my hand over to swat it when one of the flycatchers flashed by and grabbed the fly right off my leg, making no contact with my skin. We began to notice that what they were doing was picking off insects that were hovering near us.

That's awesome! As of last week, the cordilleran technically no longer exists, as it has been re-lumped as a single species with pacific-slope flycatcher, now called western flycatcher. They had only been split I think a couple of decades ago in the first place, before ornithologists called a mulligan on that decision.

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1 hour ago, hookem2010 said:

That's awesome! As of last week, the cordilleran technically no longer exists, as it has been re-lumped as a single species with pacific-slope flycatcher, now called western flycatcher. They had only been split I think a couple of decades ago in the first place, before ornithologists called a mulligan on that decision.

My wife read something about that, too, but we keep calling it a cordilleran. This is what Wiki says, but it’s not perfectly up to date:

This bird is virtually identical to the Pacific-slope flycatcher. These two species were formerly considered a single species known as western flycatcher. The species were split by the American Ornithologists’ Union in 1989.[2] The Pacific-slope flycatcher is a breeding bird of the Pacific Coast forests and mountain ranges from California to Alaska; the Cordilleran is a breeding bird of the Rocky Mountains. They have different songs and calls.

They can’t make up their minds. 
 

 

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  • 1 month later...

I escaped from hell last week to visit family in Colorado. I mostly savored the cool weather and fantastic scenery, but I always squeeze in some birding when I leave town.This trip was highlighted by a brief walk through Garden of the Gods. Dozens of white-throated swifts poured out from the cliffs while a pair of juvenile prairie falcons peered down from the top of the red rocks (Lifer #523!).

If this heat will ever abate, fall migration is picking up around Austin. I just can't handle it after 9 am, and it's not even particularly pleasant before then either.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 7/11/2023 at 1:06 PM, hookem2010 said:

The booby I had mentioned above sadly didn't last a week here before it was found dead. One of the bittersweet aspects of chasing rarities is that some injury or illness may have forced them out of their normal range, or even if healthy, they may never make it back to an area with others of their species, ending their chances of breeding.

Yeah, it is kind of sad.  I thought about that with the white wagtail that showed up in Austin a few years ago.  It might never see its kind again.

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On 6/9/2023 at 9:49 AM, HouTex said:

I know a guy who was, stress was, a catfish farmer.  His pond was about 20 miles inland in Brazoria County.  After several years of success, pelicans found his farm and a neighbor’s farm.  They ate every last one of the catfish.  He said they came in like a squadron of Japanese zeros.  The neighbor spent some time in the big house after shooting a few trying to protect his inventory. 

 

many years ago, some cormorants discovered that Barton Springs Pool had a large fish population. A month later, not a fish to be found. IT was amazing the size of those fish they could eat. At some point, I realized they always swallowed the fish head first to keep the dorsal fin from sticking in their throats. A few times they would bring up catfish that probably weighed as much as they did. If they were unable to eat them because they were so big, they would let them go, but often the fish would die anyway.

I used to love sitting in the lifeguard chair and watch the cormorants fly in, dive, eat, and fly out. When I was off duty, I'd grab a diving mask and watch them swim underwater. Incredibly fast.

There was a big stink about whether or not the City of Austin should do something. Save the Fish vs Save the Cormorants. It was quite the dilemma.

 

 

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many years ago, some cormorants discovered that Barton Springs Pool had a large fish population. A month later, not a fish to be found. IT was amazing the size of those fish they could eat. At some point, I realized they always swallowed the fish head first to keep the dorsal fin from sticking in their throats. A few times they would bring up catfish that probably weighed as much as they did. If they were unable to eat them because they were so big, they would let them go, but often the fish would die anyway.
I used to love sitting in the lifeguard chair and watch the cormorants fly in, dive, eat, and fly out. When I was off duty, I'd grab a diving mask and watch them swim underwater. Incredibly fast.
There was a big stink about whether or not the City of Austin should do something. Save the Fish vs Save the Cormorants. It was quite the dilemma.
 
 

We had a double crested cormorant depredation permit for a while. We have a small lake that borders up onto a very large lake and the double crested cormorants got pretty bad after a while. We would be duck hunting on the smaller lake and my dad would just set in a flyway between the lakes and pound cormorants all morning long. They wised up eventually and figured out the small lake was not the place to be if they didn’t want BB steel shot blasted at them.
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Just successfully chased Travis County's 1st record of hermit warbler at Mills Pond. When a successful outing is seeing your target bird for maybe 2 seconds, you start to wonder what the hell you're doing with your free time. Nonetheless, a life bird for me and #395 for Texas! At this snail's pace, I should hit 400 by the end of the decade.

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