A recap of the 2005 south Texas birding festival

Well, I’m alive and I’m back home. I’m going to make a couple of posts to catch up on what I did the last couple of weeks.

First of all, pictures from my week in south Texas are up.

Red and yellow kill a fellow…

The birding festival went very well, albeit with one major scare. A friend of mine, who was a guide, made the dumb mistake of picking up a coral snake while out on a field trip. Now this friend has regularly handled snakes for a long time. In addition to being a birder, he’s somewhat of an amateur herpetologist. But my philosphy has always been that a snake can only bite you if it gets the chance to. So while anyone might get unlucky by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I figure that when I see a poisonous snake, admiring it from a distance helps keep the odds of not getting bit in my favor.

Now while rattlesnakes may look a lot meaner, I’d gladly cuddle with one compared to a coral snake. The reason is that while rattlesnake venom attacks your muscles, coral snakes go straight for your nervous system. Their venom is probably the most toxic of all US poisonous snakes. They have rear fangs and actually have to chew on you a little while to get the venom in. Many people that get bit don’t get envenomated because the duration of the bite isn’t long enough. In other words, you’re really unlikely to have trouble with a coral snake unless your holding one.

The situation was actually pretty serious for a while. He was airlifted to a local hospital and got there really quick. The Gladys Porter Zoo of Brownsville supplied the antivenom for the bite. (I was told that some places don’t carry it since getting bit is rare). He was also on a respirator for a while. I’m assuming this is because the venom was affecting his breathing. (Poisons that shut down your nervous system prevent your diaphragm from letting you breathe properly). Anyway, within a couple of days he was actually released from the hospital (which was quicker than expected) and should be fine. Despite the fact that he was very embarrassed, everyone’s thankful he’s okay.

More than just the birds

In addition to the birds, I experienced many other incredible scenes in nature. While birding at Laguna Atascosa, we were watching an Apolomado Falcon. The bird had started flying towards us, and I was yelling out at the group, “moving left, above the horizon, coming towards us…” (you wouldn’t believe how hard a time some people have getting on a bird), when about that time, another leader exclaimed, “Bobcat, down the road.” Fifty birders stopped looking at a really good bird to watch a bobcat slowly saunter further and further away from us. We even set up the spotting scopes for breath taking views.

Snakes also seemed to be a theme of our day at Laguna Atascosa. I saw my first coral snake there and photographed it in a bucket (link to the picture is above). We also had a pair of Harris Hawks that had found a live green snake on a dried mudflat. (Harris Hawks are amazing because they hunt in packs like wolves, coordinating their actions and sharing the prey.) The snake for its part was violently whipping around from one bird towards the other. The hawks were fairly still, staring at the snake with this puzzled look on their face as if to say, “man, have some dignity.” On our way back, having just left the refuge we spotted a couple of White-tailed Hawks, one with a snake in its talons. The other grabbed the snake in mid air, and the two tumbled and spiraled to the ground, neither letting go of the snake. They actually hit the ground (not at high speed, but rough nonetheless), and after a moment of lying on their backs and staring at each other, one of them let go and flew off. You should have heard the noise from the bus as we witnessed this. The ooohs and ahhhs sounded like someone watching a fireworks show.

Another amazing moment was visiting the King Ranch and witnessing the devastation wrought by moth caterpillars. The live oaks were already stressed by drought, when an enormous outbreak of moth caterpillars showed up. The caterpillars covered the King Ranch by the thousands, perhaps millions. As we birded the ranch, caterpillars in search of a tree with leaves were so dense on the ground that we stepped on them everywhere we walked. Near a tree with leaves, the sound of the munching (and poop hitting the forest floor) was so loud that it sounded like rain. I couldn’t believe it. Interestingly, because of the sheer volume of caterpillar droppings left at the base of the tree, the tree gets back most of it’s nutrients through the soil and little damage occurs.

The Grail Bird

Perhaps the highlight of the week for me was the speaker on Saturday night. The festival has speakers everynight, and they typically save their best for last. This year’s was Tim Gallagher, professor at Cornell University and author of The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. He was also one of the first people to get a visual sighting of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker when it was rediscovered. His talk focused on the search and evidence for the rediscovery of the birds in the Big Woods of Arkansas. Not only was the talk utterfly fascinating from a scientific standpoint, but I found him to be very personable with a great sense of humor. Even a nonbirder would have enjoyed the presentation.

The festival was very tiring though. Sometimes I think most people just need less sleep than me. I was getting 4 to 6 hours a night, and often taking naps in the afternoon. I felt pretty beat down a lot. It ended well though, and I greatly enjoyed getting to be around so many people who know so much more than I do about birding (and butterflying). I learned a lot of new things, made some new friends, and if I can swing it with grad school, will definitely be back next year.

Stay tuned for a recap (with pictures of course) of my week in Mexico, along with a new direction and purpose for Ocellated…