As the weather goes, it was a nice day, not too hot, sunny, and a nice breeze. As the birds went, it was very quiet.
We returned to the Quintana Neotropical Bird Sanctuary this morning before continuing south. Once again, even early in the day, there were more birders than birds...not counting the grackles. There seemed to be a bit more activity this morning, but we still only saw a handful of species. We did finally see a warbler, a Northern Parula, but that was the only one. The only other birds of note were our first Bronzed Cowbird of the trip and a pair of painted Buntings.
The Great-tailed Grackles, on the other hand, seen to be the town bird. They were everywhere in the town, the campground and the bird sanctuary and actually made the birding a bit hard in the small area of the sanctuary as their movement and noise really made it hard to concentrate on anything else.
We left Quintana and drove south on the secondary roads. Being a Sunday morning, there was virtually no traffic. We must have been extra early in Texas terms since we passed multitudes of churches with no cars in the parking lots. Must be a "No Peaching Before 10AM" rule.
We were headed to a familiar place that turned out to be not-so-familiar, Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, where we volunteered for the winter four years ago. Hurricane Harvey really trashed the refuge. It was directly in its path when it came ashore.
The Visitor Center was closed for good since water got into the walls and it molded almost immediately. It will have to be replaced. Meanwhile, the temporary VC is a trailer. The volunteer community building was destroyed and had to be torn down and all of the maintenance bars were damaged and also are going to be torn down and replaced...and that was just the infrastructure.
The land above the shore was a live oak forest. Many of these have had limbs broken off or were uprooted and lost much of their vegetation. The more deciduous trees seem to have fared better and have new summer growth. They must be short of staff and volunteers at the moment as the roadsides and lawns around the entrance are quite overgrown. When we were here, the maintenance volunteers were mowing pretty much all the time.
We drove the tour road out to the observation tower, which was undamaged, stopping at Jones lake. This was the highlight of the visit as it was totally dry the winter we were here and now is full of water, with ducks, coots, wading birds and alligators...and one very large feral hog rooting away on the far side.
Not much was visible from the observation tower. It was high tide and there were very few birds to be seen, a few herons and egrets. There were reports of Whooping Cranes yesterday, but they were seen on the boat trip out of Rockport. Most of them have already left on their migration back to Wood Buffalo National park in Northern Alberta. and some have already been spotted as far north as the Great Lakes. We didn't see any in the usual spots where we would see them when we were here before.
After Aransas, we continued on to Goose Island State Park, just north of Rockport. It is known for its woods and birds. They even have resident volunteer Birding Hosts. Unfortunately, they have no woods. There are still lots of oaks, but most have been stripped nearly bare. It gives the campground, which was quite lush before, a rather bombe-out look. The park ranger I spoke with when checking-in said that they were worried that the birds wouldn't return this year, but most have. They had good days last week when we were up at High Island, but like Quintana, not much came in with this week's frontal change.
After getting set up in our campsite, we took a walk around the nearby campground loop. It was mostly quiet, but there was some activity at the two feeding station sanctuaries they have set up for bird watching. We managed 15 species on our short walk, including a Black-crested Titmouse and two Nashville Warblers, which we hadn't seem this trip. The only other time I've seen a Nashville Warbler was in Quebec on the Gaspé Peninsula, a long way from here. After dinner, we stopped by the sanctuary nearest us to catch sight of a male Ruby-throated Hummingbird.
Tomorrow we are off in the direction of Corpus Christi, stopping in Port Aransas on the way.
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