Jerri & I left Friday night around 7:30 for an all-night drive down to Frontera Audubon (Weslaco) to get the Roadside Hawk. We made great time getting in around 4:45am (after being stopped near Falfurrias for speeding a whole 7 miles over the speed limit at 3am-only a warning thanks to the cops' sister being a birder)
We slept in the HEB parking lot for an hour, pulled into McD's for more coffee & a bite, then off to the cemetery behind Frontera.
We finally figured out how to get in, walked the entire cemetery and found nothin'. We decided to go to the main entrance since it was around 8am by then. We paid our admission, checked the orchard area (where the hawk had been being seen recently) and hit their trails. We weren't too far into the preserve when we came upon this huge pile of raptor feathers. We had befriended this man back at the cemetery and he was walking with us. When we 3 saw the feathers we looked at eachother & said, "Uh oh". He looked up and noted there were feathers stuck to the branch right above the feather pile. Well, by the end of the day the rumour was, that was, in fact, what was left of the Roadside Hawk.
They have collected the feathers and sent them to Dr. Keith Arnold at TAMU for identification. I asked Jerri if we could count it?
During the day I got a lifer male Tropical Parula - fantastic views at the feeding station.
We had left around 10:30a yesterday to run over to Quinta Mazatlan (my first time there - it's very nice!) and we got the jaw-droppingly beautiful male Crimson-collared Grosbeak. It was a lifer for me and Jerri had never seen a male.
On the way home this morning, we made a jog over to Freer where we saw on TexBirds there was a Cassin's Vireo seen a couple of days ago in some woods behind a motel. We got there around 8:30a and I found it after about 45 min - lifer #3 for my weekend - woo hoo! Jerri needed it for her Texas list. (see my new thumbs up avatar)
So our target bird was not found (well, I guess part of him was
) but I had a great weekend coming home with 3 lifers. That driving all night isn't for sissies, that's for sure. ouch. I told Jerri that Best Western was the Fairmount in my eyes last night!
