After a nice dark and quiet night in the Botanical Garden parking area (sure beats a Walmart), we ere up by 4:30AM for the 5:30AM departure of the trip to the King Ranch Norias Division. It was a two hour drive to reach that part of the ranch.
King Ranch is bigger than Rhode Island and is split into several non-contiguous units, Compared to what it was, that is relatively small. At one point all of the units of the ranch totaled over ten million acres in several countries.
The Norias Division primarily a cattle operation but contains extensive woods and a great diversity of birds, including some very rare ones. They have an active program of birding tours, especially during migration season, but they are very controlled. You have to take a tour.
Our tour was the most desirable one and it was a long day on a big ranch with 40 miles of driving inside the ranch itself...and 200 miles of driving getting to and from the ranch.
The trip was geared to finding the rare target birds—primarily the Ferruginous Pygmy Owl. It is a very rare owl and almost all of them are on King Ranch. They estimate that there are 300 pairs of owls on the ranch. It was the first bird we looked for and we found it. It was the only one we saw, although a couple of others were heard.
We saw a total of 51 species in 7 hours of birding with 9 new species for Ellen. As well as the owl, we saw Groove-billed Ani, Brown-crested Flycatcher, Western Kingbird, Tropical Kingbird, Tropical Parula, Audubon's Oriole, Botteri's Sparrow and Olive Sparrow. Some of them, including the owl were attracted to us by calling them. This is not allowed in most sanctuaries and open refuges, but the biologist who led the trip pointed out that the trips into the ranch are strictly limited in number, they don't do the same routes all the time, and only they are allowed to call, so it minimizes the disturbance to the birds compared to an open refuge where there are lost of birders.
After another two hour ride we were back to festival by about 5 PM. We decided to leave at that point and find some place for dinner. Some of other birders on the trip were talking about good seafood in Corpus Christi so we listened in. We decided on dinner at Scuttlebutt's a seafood restaurant and bar on Padre Island. It had good seafood, but was a bit loud. Ellen had an Ahi Tuna salad and I had the seared Ahi Tuna dinner, which came on a sizzling hot cast iron skillet. It was so hot that I was able to slice the rare seared tuna and do an additional sear on the cut sides before eating.
I had ordered sweet potato fries without cinnamon sugar (the normal way here in the south), but they came sugared. The waiter apologized and came back with a giant side order of crispy sweet potato fries that Ellen and I polished off (which we probably shouldn't have done...but they were very good).
We returned to Bird Island Basin in the National Seashore for another warm and windy overnight.
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