Last weekend, Amy and I went up to Abilene to be with my folks. We were able to do a little birding on Saturday morning at a local park that includes some of Lake Fort Phantom. I had recently given my dad an old camera of mine, and he happily took a few pictures.
One of the great joys of getting my wife into birding has been to experience things first hand all over again. I imagine this is a joy that any mentor or teacher feels. My wife has been steadily adding new birds here and there as we’ve travel about, and at the start of the day, she had seen 398 species. Not too shabby, though then again, she has a great personal guide.
One of the mythical creatures that has been eluding us all winter is Wilson’s Snipe. Yes, for you non-birders, there really is such a thing as a snipe. (I once had a reporter who simply would not believe that such a bird was real, even when I showed him pictures in a book. He was convinced that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax and he wasn’t going to fall for it.) Well, based on a good tip from my mom who’d just seen several at the park within the week, we finally caught up to the critters.

So now Amy needs just one more bird to hit 400.
In addition to the park, we stopped by the local landfill, where gulls by the thousands come in to feast on the endless buffet our trash provides. It came as a surprise to me that Abilene has two landfills, side by side, though apparently not managed by the same companies. One landfill let us right in and we happily scanned the gulls and ducks on several ponds. The other landfill wasn’t so accommodating, and the guy there informed me that if we’d been to the landfill next door, then there was nothing different for us to see at his landfill. I tried, very nicely, to explain that everything’s not the same and that we were in effect, looking for that needle in a haystack, the rare gull amongst the thousands of Ring-billed Gulls. Not buying it, and to back up his authority, he explained that he’d been here for 27 years and that “it’s all the same seagulls.”
What a dump!
Update, Feb 7, 2009
As we later realized, Amy has already seen Wilson’s Snipe. Several times in fact. That doesn’t deminish the enjoyment of the bird. And all’s well that end’s well.