It was cold and wet when we left Grande Isle yesterday morning. We left early due to the weather and because we had a six hour drive to Sea Rim State Park in Texas. We had made reservations in advance for there and for a RV park in High Island for Monday and Tuesday nights. We really don't care to make reservations in advance because interesting things can happen where we are. Unfortunately, the campgrounds have been getting busier each year and weekends almost always need reservations well in advance. Oh well.
With a front passing and northerlies, it was good conditions for what is called a migratory fallout. Many of the migratory songbirds that winter in South and Central America fly from Mexico to the Gulf Coast over the Gulf of Mexico on their way north. They are instinctively primed to leave the Yucatan on a southerly wind for a long overnight crossing of the Gulf. If the winds stay with them most pass right over the coast and land well inland to recover from the crossing.
Since birds don't have access to weather forecasts, they have no way of knowing what the weather ahead will be. If they run into headwinds while on the way, it becomes a desperate dash to the coast. Those who make it "fallout" into whatever woods they can find when they hit the coast. As the Gulf Coast has become quite built up and coastal woodlands (these are woodland birds such as warblers) are far and few between, seemingly large numbers of exhausted birds all land in the same few places at the same time
These were the conditions on Saturday night. Grand Isle is Louisiana's prime fallout spot since it sticks out into the gulf as a high island with a few woods...but it is further from the Yucatan than spots further west so the birds flying in the direction of Louisiana and eastward have further to go. On a bad day they tend to arrive in the afternoon, but we had to move on to get to our reservations in Texas.
Not all was lost. Just a few miles before Sea Rim State Park is the Sabine Woods Sanctuary. It is a woods owned by Houston Audubon. At first we thought that we might pass by, check in and come back today, but as we approached it we saw dozens of cars parked in front. This meant that it was happening, so we stopped as well.
There were birders and birds everywhere. A large group of people were crowded around the entrance looking up at the trees. There were swallows that were so tired that they would fly slowly from one patch of grass to another at about knee-level through the crowd. It wasn't the fabled "every tree dripping with warblers", but there were birds in all of the trees and bushes, flitting about and chowing down on bugs. We spent about two hours there and walked only about a third of the sanctuary trails and still managed to see 19 species and 50 birds. A least that is all we identified, we saw several times that many that were moving too quickly for us to get on them...we had been traveling for six hours to get there. We'd never seen so many Hooded Warblers.
We continued on to the state park and checked in and took a quick look at the campground and shoreline before dinner and noticed another 13 species.
After dinner, we retired early hoping to watch a DVD, but managed to break the DVD player, so we just retired early.
This morning we got an early start and were back at Sabine Woods by 7:30 am. There was already another car there and by the time we took a break a couple of hours later, there were about two dozen vehicles parked out front, three of them Class B RVs (including Speedy). This is on a Monday morning.
We spent about 5 hours in the woods this morning and identified 42 species and 115 birds. Once again, several times as many got away. Two life birds for Ellen: Yellow-throated Vireo and Kentucky Warbler and those two plus a third one, Cerulean Warbler, for me.
After lunch, we left Sabine Woods for a stop at Anahuac NWR, about an hour away. This is a totally different experience as they have extensive wetlands and impoundments. We only drove the 2.5 mile Shoveler Loop as it was already after 3PM when we arrived, but we still managed to tally 36 species and over 700 birds including a large flock (70)Fulvous Whistling-Ducks, a life bird, and a Swainson's Hawk, also a life bird.
It was dinner time when we checked into the High Island RV Park in High Island. This is another famous birding spot with several Audubon Sanctuaries. They a also a prime migrant trap with over 70 species reported in each of their sites today. Tomorrow should be another interesting day as the winds are continuing to come from the north.
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