Port Aransas Christmas Bird Count 2016-12-19

On Monday I participated in the Christmas Bird Count of my original home town, Port Aransas, TX. As usual, Warren Pulich and I covered the Port Aransas Nature Preserve at Charlie's Pasture and the south jetty. (Warren is a long-time Texas birder and one of the originators of the Port Aransas CBC back in the 1970s.) Most years we have a few more people on our team but this year it was just the two of us. Temperatures in the 30s and north winds over 20 mph made the morning challenging, both to find birds and stay warm.

Bird highlights included a flyover of about 50 Snow Geese heading northeast. They were low enough to get these photos of a few of them:

Songbirds were hard to come by in the cold wind, but we found a few. At the end of the morning we were most excited to find a group of three Palm Warblers foraging together in the recently burned area of the preserve along Port Avenue. These birds are expected winter residents, but are never common. Here are a couple:

An interesting plant observation was this high concentration of Black Mangrove seeds at the edge of many mud flats:

A big surprise find for me was the remains of a sea turtle at the edge of one of the mottes. My guess is that this turtle washed up on the nearby shore and a coyote or other similar-sized animal carried it up into the dunes to eat it. Here's a poor photo of part of it, and see the attached observation.

Here are a few more photos on Flickr.

Here are our bird lists for the day on eBird:
http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist/S33110773
http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist/S33110776
http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist/S33110778

Here's Warren on the left and me on the right, trying to stay warm in the morning:

Posted on Δεκέμβριος 23, 2016 1215 ΠΜ by mikaelb