It was so-o-o-o tempting to title this something like “Whooping It Up”.
In early February, I joined an Earthwatch trip to study Whooping Cranes at Aransas NWR, which is on the Texas coast about 45 minutes north of Corpus Christi. We spent five days observing cranes in two different habitats — coastal marshes in the refuge and an “urban” neighborhood in Lamar TX.
For my vacations, I really like the Earthwatch model — traveling with a small group of volunteers to support research projects. I like seeing new birds as much as the next person, but don’t travel purely for adding new birds to my list. (No judgement on those who do, it’s just not my interest.) My preference is to have another reason for travel like family visits, classes or volunteer work and then see birds as part of the trip.
This trip seemed snakebit from the start. I registered in October, but it didn’t finally get enough participants until hours before it would have been cancelled. (January and March trips had enough people but didn’t work for my schedule.) A few days before it started, the lead investigator tested positive for COVID so was unable to join us in person until a few days after we started; his assistant led us in the meantime. Hours before I left for Texas, I got word that my flight was delayed — meaning I’d miss my connection and wouldn't arrive til the next morning. Fortunately, there was an earlier flight that would let me make the connection. For once, I had packed early, so was able to get a quick ride to the airport from my SIL and made the earlier flight with minutes to spare.
One other volunteer had arrived Saturday night and joined me for a quick trip to Padre Island and Port Aransas on Sunday morning. We were hampered by a howling gale, but still managed to get a little more familiar with the local birds. I haven’t really spent any time around the Gulf, and she’s from the UK, so there were plenty of new (and semi-new) birds for both of us.
One of the first birds we saw was a Crested Caracara. I was really excited, and tried to grab a few photos. Little did I know how many we’d see during the week. We got our first looks at Whooping Cranes in Port Aransas at the Leonabelle Turner Birding Center, a really nice park. I heard later that there is a group of Green Jays there, a bird I’d love to see. Alas, we cut short our walk due to the wind.
After our short adventure we met up with the rest of the group. One of the great things about Earthwatch trips is that they tend to attract interesting people, and this group was probably the best yet. We fell into easy conversation during the drive to the beach house where we’d be staying.
On the first morning, we had a review of some of the things that they were looking at in the study — basically the hydrology of the wetlands, and the effects of changing levels of salinity on the food resources for the cranes and all the other wildlife. A representative of the International Crane Foundation also talked to us about the cranes themselves in more detail. The birds we’d be watching migrate from northwest Canada — from Wood Buffalo National Park, their summer breeding grounds — and some birds who stay in the Aransas area year round. I had expected that some of the birds would be from the ICF’s reintroduction programs, but the reintroduced birds are actually more in Louisiana.
Last, we talked about the work we’d be doing in the field, observing crane behavior and (later) doing some plot surveys in the wetlands to look at food resources. Observation entailed watching a group of cranes for 20 minutes and recording their behavior every fifteen seconds. We also recorded any banded birds we spotted. (Not easy to see when they’re in tall vegetation!) The plot surveys were conducted at spots on the wetlands where we had seen cranes foraging previously.
Observations took place in two (very) different habitats. Half were done within Aransas NWR; we travelled by boat and looked for birds foraging either in the marshland or occasionally at the water’s edge. We watched them from our boat; fortunately the waters weren't too choppy most of the time. The other half of the observations were done in Lamar, across the bay from Aransas, in the areas around 8th Street — our “urban” observations. After our morning of talks, we set out for an afternoon of training in Lamar.
It’s the damndest thing. Residents set up wildlife feeders to attract deer, waterfowl and other critters. The feeders look like a trashcan on stilts, and shoot out a corn/feed mix when a timer goes off. About 10-15 years ago, some of the Whooping Cranes discovered this easy food source and started showing up. The loose flocks are mostly singletons, likely birds who haven’t reached breeding age yet, but there were also a few family groups (two adults and a colt). We saw as many as 25+ of them here — roughly 5% of the wild population — in an area less than a square mile, in the yards of about a dozen homeowners.. It would be like having a flock of Kirtland’s Warblers hanging out in your birdbath. Crazy.
We found a family unit and paired up to watch each of the three birds; our assistant leader was the timekeeper. At each fifteen second mark, we’d say which of six different states of activity our bird was in — foraging, resting, locomotion, etc. Working in pairs allowed us to fine-tune our observations and build confidence. We did three different sets of observations — actually 2.5 sets, because the last group flew off a few minutes into the survey. We managed to keep track of them as they flew across St. Charles Bay to the Refuge, where they landed with a group of about a dozen other cranes.
The next morning we took a trip on a a local boat, the Skimmer, out of Fulton. It was great way to get a feel for the Refuge and the surrounding area from the water side. We’d be seeing things from this view for the rest of the week, but for most visitors this would be the best way to see the area — you get a better look at the cranes and other waterbirds (and more of them!) than you’d get from most places on land. And on land, you’d never have dolphins running along beside you. Just sayin’
After lunch, we finally met up with our leader, symptom-free and testing negative. (He still masked up for that first day, just to be safe.) We headed to the Refuge and our first trip on the water. It was a small flat-bottomed, shallow-draft boat; that was important because we quickly learned just how shallow the waters could be. We wore life preservers while we were on the water, but the safety briefing started with: if you fall out of the boat, stand up. The one place that the water got deeper was in the channel of the Intracoastal Waterway, which runs alongside the Refuge. It was startling to encounter the shipping barges while we were out on our counts.
For the next three days, we traded off doing urban and Refuge observations. Sightlines in the refuge were tricky — from the water, we were slightly below the level of the birds, and vegetation at the edges tended to be higher than in the surrounding area; some islands also had berms. Since one of the goals was to revisit the area and survey for food on a subsequent day, we generally didn’t observe birds who were foraging in the water; they would have been much easier to keep in sight.
During the last two days, we started doing the food resource surveys. We needed to find a place where we’d seen cranes on previous days, but they couldn’t be present at the time of our survey (to avoid disturbance). There were three parts to the survey — walking the edges of the upland ponds to look for blue crabs (a favorite menu item for the cranes), doing a transect to look for wolf berries (another crane treat), and dropping a meter into the upland ponds to measure their salinity (vs. that of the open water of the bays). We were there toward the end of berry season so we only found a few.
On the final day, we had a few hours between the end of trip and when our flights left, so my new friend and I got a car and visited a few parks around Corpus Christi. They were nice during our mid-winter visit, but I can only imagine what they must be like during migration. Someday, when Texas is sane again, I’ll visit in spring or fall.
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On a final note (in both senses of the word) — by now, most of us have heard of the death of Flaco the owl in New York City. Though his fate seemed inevitable, it was nice to see how long he survived. He apparently hit a building/window, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that he had rodenticides in his system. Maybe this will get more people on board for bird-safe building standards, and for banning anticoagulant rodenticides.