Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Returning to Bird Spring migration at High Island - Day 2

After an eventful first day where I ended the day on a high with the sighting of a Sora, I was anxious to return to Anuhuac National WLR to see if I could find more of these skulking birds. In the morning I headed straight to the refuge.

Here I took the drive which circles around the lake. It's a great place to look for Egrets, Ibis and Ducks. There were Blue-winged teals, Mottled Ducks, Coots, Black-bellied Whistling Ducks and my first sighting of Fulvous Whistling-Ducks. There were Pied-billed Grebes diving around and we could see Common Gallinule and Purple Gallinules walking along the edges of the reeds. Another interesting sighting was of a Least Bittern. Another first for me. I did get to brief look at Sora again before it went into the reeds. And at the visitor center I walked around the small garden patch where I could find Orchard Orioles.

Blue-winged Teal

Black-bellied Whistling Duck

Black-necked Stilt

Fulvous Whistling-duck

Common Gallinule

Neotropic Cormorant

Mottled Duck

White Ibis


Pied-billed Grebe


Purple Gallinule

Least Bittern

Orchard Oriole



Black-bellied Whistling-duck


After this I headed towards the Boy-scouts sanctuary to see if there were any new overnight migrants. But unfortunately the place still seemed quite with very few birds being reported from within the park. Last year I did see most of the thrushes here apart from Grey-cheeked and Louisiana Thrushes. This time got lucky and saw the Grey-cheeked. We would see Brown Thrasher, Grey-cheeked, Wood and Swainson's thrush visiting the fountain inside the sanctuary. We also had Kentucky warbler along with Ovenbird visiting this fountain. It was one of the productive places to see birds in the park. Another interesting bird that I got see was Philadelphia Vireo which I missed in my last visit here as well.

Western Kingbird

Summer Tanager

Summer Tanager

Grey-cheeked Thrush

Red-eyed Vireo

Summer Tanager


Hooded Warbler

Hermit Thrush

Wood Thrush


Ovenbird

Tennessee Warbler


Gray Catbird

Ash-throated Flycatcher

Grey-cheeked Thrush

Rose-breasted Bunting

Philadelphia Vireo



It was another good visit to High Island. Can't wait for next spring to visit this place again. I hope Hurricane Harvey has not caused lot of damage to this place.


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