Day 14 - Fable, Mystery Bird and The Strangeness Of Whistling Ducks.

The front came racing through last night at about 2AM, rocking Speedy and pelting it with rain. Several more rain bands followed through the morning. It was supposed to be the perfect setup for a fallout and the tiny Quintana Neotropical Bird Sanctuary is supposedly fabled for its fallouts.

Nobody told the birds.

We walked over to the Sanctuary four times during the day from about 7:30 this morning to 6:30 this afternoon. There were more birders than birds and more photographers than birders. The paths were packed, but the trees were not. The few migrants we saw yesterday undoubtedly left on last evenings southerly winds, but their replacements never seemed to arrive.

We managed to see 23 species, mostly locals, and no warblers. The official list was 41 species, but we missed about half of them and only about a half-dozen were warblers. Meanwhile...further east things are cooking. They had well over a hundred species reported at Sabine Woods and 90 species at High Island's Boy Scout Woods.

So far Quintana has been more fable than fabled. We will check one last time tomorrow morning before we continue on. Maybe we will have more luck.

We also had today's mystery bird. At the corner of the road heading out of the campground is a bit of a brushy marshy area. Each time we would walk by today, we would flush a weak flying bird that looked like a short-billed rail, but we would always be looking in the wrong spot when it flushed and never got a good enough look to identify it before it buried itself in the grass further away. Sora seems most likely, but could it have been a Yellow or Black Rail? We'll never know.

Finally, the Whistling Ducks. We don't see Whistling Ducks at home but they are resident down here. We have seen lots of them so far this trip, mostly in ponds and impounds, but here in Quintana they are frequently seen flying over and roosting in places where you do not normally see a duck. This morning we had several landing on power lines as if they were pigeons. Later we saw then perched on the roof peak of a house neatly and evenly spaced. Other than wood ducks perched in trees, I've never seen the kind of behavior of these ducks and other ducks.

Tomorrow we are off to Aransas and the Rockport area. There were still a few Whooping Cranes reports yesterday, but they are leaving for Canada. I hope we see one, but we actually expected that they would all be gone by now.