Day 12 - Bolivar Flats

It was a pleasant beginning to the day with the sun rising over the Gulf of Mexico as viewed from Speedy. We had a quiet night on the beach. It was locally pretty dark, with no campground security lights, but we were  surrounded by lights...city lights from Galveston to the west, a long string of streetlights from the main road on the far side of the marshes behind us, and from the deck lights of many ships and oil platforms anchored out off the coast to our south...but we slept well.

Morning Light—Speedy at Bolivar Flats

After a quick breakfast of our usual muesli, we drove Speedy up to the west end of the beach to the entrance to the Houston Audubon Bolivar Flats Shorebird Sanctuary. We were looking for shorebirds and we were not disappointed. It was low tide and there were thousands out on the flats and in the shallow water of the gulf. We spend about half the morning there and found 25 species of herons and egrets and plovers and sandpipers and gull and terns and avocets, not to mention the pelicans.

One of our quests was to find Wilson's Plovers, which were supposed to be resident here. Once again, we spent a long time peering out at the flocks of tiny gray and white shorebirds only to have one walk right in front of us as we started back to Speedy. He was then joined by two others. We thought this was a life bird, but after checking with eBird, it seems we saw on when we were working at Aransas NWR four years ago this month. Another rarity for us, and certainly for the Texas Coast was an Iceland Gull. According to the Audubon Shorebird monitor who was also out there, this Gull has been hanging around for about a month.

After birding the flats, we drove out to the entrance road to check out the marshes along the road. It was also pretty productive, with 22 species found.

It was now lunch time and as we were headed out to the main road we continued out and went west to Fort Travis Park, just east of the Galveston Ferry. This is a well-kept park based on an old coastal fort at the entrance to Galveston Bay. We just parked at a spot that overlooked green lawns and the anchorage along the ship channel. It was lunch time, not birding time (besides, all the park had were a few Great-tailed Grackles begging for chips.)

After lunch we turned east and drove back up the Bolivar Peninsula to Rollover Pass, a cut that runs from the Gulf to the Bay. It has parking lots on both sides of the bridge, and free overnighting (with a Bolivar Beach Pass, of course). There were quite a few folks fishing from the bulkheads on each side of the cut and it looked like a rather unpleasant place to spend the night, but we did a bit on birding on the Bay side of the pass.

It was quite surprising as it was very shallow and teeming with birds hanging out on sandbars and splashing about. In addition to the usual cast of sandpipers and plovers...and the pelicans, of course, we found our first Black Skimmers and Oystercatchers for the year. There were also hundreds of terns resting on the flats, mostly Royal, Forster's and Least Terns, but we managed to find a Caspian Tern and a Sandwich Term, the latter is the life bird of the day.

Since Rollover Pass was unappealing as an overnight spot, we have returned to Bolivar Flats for another evening. Tomorrow, we will continue southwest, taking the ferry to Galveston, doing a bit of Grocery Shopping, then continuing to Quintana and the Quintana Beach County Park. It is also the location of the Quintana Neotropical Bird Sanctuary (supposed to be a very good spot) and the Quintana Xeriscape Nature Reserve.

This is a spot we've never been to before and we hope it is an interesting stop. It looks like the weather is going to deteriorate a bit and a front may be coming through on Saturday...maybe another fallout situation?

Extra: As I was pulling the Speedy photo off of Ellen's little camera, there was this image that she took at a truck stop during our drive from home. We meant to post it earlier.

Hauling a Large Load