Visit to Blue Bluff Road and Hornsby Bend

Today was our first chance in several weeks to spend an early Saturday morning birdwatching. ("Early" is a relative term; my guy set his alarm for 6:00, and asked if I was ready to roll out; I told him he'd have to wait until 7:00.) No coffee in the house, so we pulled into our neighborhood fast-food place to get our caffeine fix before we hit the road.

Blue Bluff Road runs by a prairie wilderness preserve, where a piece of the original wild-grass habitat of this area has been kept as it was before the arrival of plowed-field cropland in the 19th century. We didn't venture onto the preserve, but we did look at birds in a good-sized pond next to Bloore Road, just off of Blue Bluff Road.

A group of Northern Shoveler ducks (an assortment of males, females, and juveniles, we think) who were feeding in the water near the road decided to swim (in formation) to the other side of the pond as soon as we stopped the car to look at them.

The mothers and young gathered in a sheltered corner of the pond, half-screened behind leafless bushes, while the fathers patrolled the open waters in clear view of our car. After a few moments in which we did nothing scarier than peer through our binoculars, the birds were bold enough to begin diving for food again. We got some excellent views of the males, and had fun with the Texas Bird Book, figuring out an identification all on our own. (When Tom and Elizabeth were here, they figured out the identifications faster than we could focus the binoculars.)

The two black vultures hanging around, one in a tree and one on a telephone pole, were much easier to identify. Scrawny head, big body, looking like something out of a horror movie.

With that warm-up, we moved on to Hornsby Bend, the wastewater processing facility that also functions as a bird sanctuary. There were more families of Northern Shovelers, plus some American Coots, both juvenile and adult, and a couple of small black birds (one with red feathers on the shoulders of his wings) who were in a small tree near one of the ponds. We haven't yet been able to identify these last birds.

Of course, the tech guy I married thinks that one of the best parts of the morning was meeting another birdwatcher who was not equipped with binoculars, but with a camera and an enormous telephoto lens. My guy was so impressed he stopped our car and rolled down the window to get a better look. Fortunately, the camera owner was friendly, but we couldn't tell her where to find any cinnamon teal.

The migration season should be in full swing next month; who knows what we will see then?