THREE

The Coastal Oak Woods of Texas and Louisiana

MIGRANT MAGNETS

Early April 2015

Northern Parula

All of a sudden a warbler starts and stops. All of a sudden it flashes from branch to branch, peers under leaves, snaps up caterpillars, darts on again.

—EDWIN WAY TEALE, North with the Spring

In the hour before dawn, a Great Horned Owl hoots its low, cadenced five-note series close to the Mad Island lodge. As sunrise approaches, fog cloaks the prairie, and dew soaks the grass and my tent. The winds are light this morning, so work will go forward at the banding station. There has been no big arrival of Neotropical migrants, and by midmorning, I’ll say my good-byes and head three hours northeast toward my next destination: High Island, Texas. Perhaps a big pulse of Gulf-crossing migrants will show up there in the next few days.

High Island is a tiny coastal community that sits atop a salt dome amid a broad expanse of saltmarsh in the easternmost corner of Texas. It is isolated from I-10 and the strip-mall town of Winnie to the north by the shipping channel of the Intracoastal Waterway, which carries barge traffic between industrial facilities in southern Louisiana and coastal southern Texas. This channel also passes in front of the Mad Island banding camp, three hours to the southwest.

Birding and fishing are the primary attractions of High Island and its environs; its small downtown includes only a single motel and a gas station/convenience store, both crowded in spring with birdwatchers who come here to check out arriving migrant songbirds in the woodland reserves, to visit the local waterbird rookery to see displaying egrets and spoonbills, to wander the adjacent Bolivar Peninsula to spot birds of beach and estuary, and to visit adjacent Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge for marsh and open-country birds. For a few weeks each spring, this corner of Texas produces some of the best birding on earth.

Like Mad Island, High Island is not a true island surrounded by water. Instead it’s a small wooded rise ringed by marshlands, its uplands beloved by birders for the oak woodlands that lure passing songbird migrants in spring. The songbirds arrive at High Island after their overwater crossing and descend into the community’s woodlots to feed, drink, bathe, and regroup. Winding sylvan trails in the small reserves allow birders to approach these normally elusive birds up close.

High Island is diminutive and its woodland reserves are tiny as well, yet they can attract remarkable concentrations of songbirds. The community features five private woodland sanctuaries owned and operated by the Houston Audubon Society and the Texas Ornithological Society, each of which offers critical food and shelter to migrating birds on their way north. They are the focus of an annual springtime pilgrimage by birders from all over North America, who come in hopes of seeing a songbird fall-out.

SONGBIRD FALL-OUTS

Whereas the Mad Island coastal woods attract both trans-Gulf migrants and those traveling north along the eastern coastline of Mexico, most songbirds arriving at High Island have flown over the Gulf. Many of them depart from the Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico, about six hundred miles south-southeast of High Island. Some have already flown there from Amazonia, Colombia, and various parts of Central America, journeying in jumps that in some places required them to travel over the Caribbean. On the Yucatán, the migrants feed, rest, and wait for benign southerly winds and fair skies—conditions favorable for a flight north over water.

When conditions on a spring evening are promising, these birds rise into the sky and fly north, eventually reaching a cruising elevation of several thousand feet, depending on where they find favorable winds. Some species apparently fly north in small groups, staying together for the long flight. They keep a fixed course and travel all night, not making landfall on the U.S. mainland until late in the afternoon of the following day: a flight of some fifteen to eighteen hours. Those crossing the Gulf include not only Neotropical songbirds but also birds of various other lineages—herons, ducks, shorebirds, cuckoos, and more. Between mid-April and mid-May, rivers of birds pour northward across the Gulf, millions and millions of them heading toward the U.S. coast. They are not attempting to arrive in a specific spot on the U.S. mainland; nor do they need to. Examining a map of the lands surrounding the Gulf shows that a bird departing the Yucatán and flying generally northward will eventually make landfall somewhere, no matter how far off course it strays, because there is Florida to the northeast; Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama due north; and Texas to the northwest. This long arc of coastline can generously accommodate the migrant birds no matter which way the winds may carry them.

If the weather remains fair and the winds are following, the birds have an easy flight, and, upon reaching land, most keep flying northward until they reach the extensive bottomland forests of the mainland interior. If, on the other hand, the winds turn or rain or thick fog disturbs the birds’ northward travels, they may have difficulty making it to the coast. On those days, the exhausted migrants tend to descend at the first sign of land and head straight for the nearest coastal woodland patches. This is when places such as High Island prove both vital for the birds and exciting for birdwatchers.

The most extreme bouts of contrary weather create what is called a fall-out, in which massive numbers of northbound birds literally fall out of the sky to land on the coast. A fall-out—while not necessarily killing birds—is a taxing event for them. Each time a migrant songbird heads north from the Yucatán, it is taking a chance. It makes its move because of favorable local weather conditions, but it cannot predict what weather may occur en route. A strong cold front could be heading southward out of the Great Plains. Or a band of thunderstorms might blanket the Gulf Coast. Both spell trouble. Birders watching from beaches during bad weather have seen migrants moving heroically just above the wave tops, fighting a headwind to cover the last few hundred yards to solid ground. Some individuals drop into the waves just short of their destination; other birds make it to the beach and then expire from hypothermia and starvation. Fortunate others labor to shore, land in a shrub, and immediately begin refueling on tiny gnats and other prey.

Offshore observers on oil-drilling platforms have reported thousands of small songbirds flying into headwinds but making virtually no progress. Some stopped and rested on the platforms’ superstructure, but most continued on without pausing. It seems that the birds are focused single-mindedly on making it to the coast. Luckily, such catastrophic events have been seen only rarely by platform-based observers. On most days (and nights), the migrants move at high elevations over the rigs and continue northward, making their crossing successfully.

Why do at least sixty-five species of Neotropical migrant songbirds take the trans-Gulf route rather than the more circuitous one around the bend of the Mexican coast (chosen by seventeen of the species)? Despite the hazards, the overwater route must be the more efficient and advantageous one. A migrant takes the overwater journey across the Gulf because it gives the bird a leg up in the race north to claim a breeding territory and optimize, over its lifetime, its production of offspring, contributing to the gene stocks of future generations. The unsympathetic hand of natural selection drives the evolution of bird behavior, including the innate selection of particular migratory pathways.

Christopher Columbus and other early explorers traversing the Gulf of Mexico noted the passage of land birds far from shore in spring and fall, but no naturalist took such comments as proof of a trans-Gulf migration route for several centuries. In the 1940s, George Lowery, of Louisiana State University, was the first to argue that songbirds actually do cross the Gulf in migration, but prominent naysayers ridiculed his hypothesis. Lowery worked in the Yucatán at night, using a telescope to spot the dark shapes of birds crossing the face of the full moon on their way northward. Large numbers of songbirds, he discovered, were making the trans-Gulf spring crossing. Those few ornithologists and birders along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana who had witnessed spring fall-outs in Louisiana were convinced by Lowery’s reports, but others doubted that such small birds could fly so long without rest and food.

Sidney Gauthreaux, one of Lowery’s graduate students at LSU, used pioneering nighttime radar studies in the 1960s to confirm that, yes, indeed, birds migrate north across the Gulf in numbers, often high in the sky. Most recently, with the aid of ever-better weather radar technology, Gauthreaux has provided strong baseline evidence that the number of songbird migrants crossing the Gulf has declined substantially during the forty years he has been conducting this work. As I traveled northward, I would learn from various experts about the complex causes of the migrants’ decline, which are not related to the rigors of their Gulf crossing.

On my first morning at High Island, I bike to the Houston Audubon Society’s Boy Scout Woods reserve to purchase an entry badge. Near the registration desk, a solitary male Hooded Warbler, in bold yellow and black, gaily bathes in a shallow bird bath beneath an artificial water drip. Facing the bath is a small grandstand occupied by about a dozen birders who tote binoculars, field guides, and digital SLR cameras fitted with telephoto lenses. Most High Island woodlands feature such drips—and nearby observer benches—to attract migrant songbirds to drink and bathe, and, in turn, to draw groups of birders.

Neotropical migrants were scarce at Boy Scout Woods that first morning, though plenty of local resident birds were in full voice. Still early in the migration season, the weather had not forced many northbound migrants down into these coastal woods; indeed, the little woodland patches of High Island are often migrant-free early in the season. On the other hand, during peak high season, around April 20, a birder does not need a fall-out to enjoy a day of birding far superior to any back at home in Indiana or Maryland; some percentage of the migrating birds always drops into the coastal reserves instead of continuing inland.

For those used to Mid-Atlantic birding, the remarkable thing about the arrival of songbirds along the Gulf Coast is that it takes place in the afternoon, not in the predawn hours. A woodland silent at 9 a.m. or 1 p.m. might start swarming with birds at 4 p.m., and birders can experience first-hand the phantomlike arrival of the migrants over the water in full daylight. Today’s smart phones and sophisticated weather-tracking technology give birders tools to communicate among themselves and predict where birds will show up, but pinpointing arrivals of big numbers of migrants on the coast remains the realm of guesswork. Birders must venture out to see for themselves what has come in from the Gulf.

SONGBIRD WOODS

A few days later, I visited High Island’s Smith Oaks Sanctuary, with songbirds aplenty despite the absence of fall-out. The afternoon show began in the parking lot, where a small mulberry tree in full fruit was the target of two long-lensed photographers capturing shots of an array of migrant songbirds. Several Rose-breasted Grosbeaks ate with gusto, finding the purple berries irresistible; the adult males, which had wintered in a Central American forest, sported a rosy bib against a white breast and belly, harlequin black-and-white upper parts, and a big, triangular pinkish-white bill. On its breeding grounds in the hardwood forests of the Northeast, this grosbeak is a shy canopy dweller, heard but rarely seen, but here one could stand on the lot’s grassy verge within fifteen feet of the birds as they foraged in the small mulberry at eye level. Also gorging in the mulberry were a male Orchard Oriole (black and chestnut), a male Baltimore Oriole (black, white, and fiery orange), several male Summer Tanagers (orange-red, with a yellow bill), a male Scarlet Tanager (deep red, with black wings and tail), and several Cedar Waxwings (tan and black-masked, with red and yellow highlighting on wings and tail). Here were five of the most colorful songbirds in North America—all in a twenty-foot mulberry tree by a crowded parking lot.

I was joined by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department ornithologist Cliff Shackelford and his wife, Julie, director of Texas programs for the Conservation Fund (a nongovernmental organization similar to the Nature Conservancy). Both have devoted their lives to the protection of natural habitat for Texas’s birds and other wildlife; effective nature conservation, here as elsewhere, is driven by productive, can-do people such as the Shackelfords, who bird every chance they get when they’re not working. Julie told me that the Conservation Fund had just helped purchase the Powderhorn Ranch—five thousand acres of remnant coastal prairie adjacent to Mad Island—thus substantially expanding the protected coastal prairie facing Matagorda Bay.

Rose-breasted Grosbeak

In the oak woods, crisscrossed with winding and shadowy trails, we observed fifteen species of passage migrant wood warblers—Cliff’s favorite birds and my quest group—over a ninety-minute period. A Black-and-white Warbler crept up a sloping branch, acting like a nuthatch. Below it, an Ovenbird searched fallen leaves on the ground for insect prey. High in the leafy branches of a big old Live Oak crept several warblers—a Northern Parula (diminutive but colorful), a Black-throated Green Warbler (with a black throat patch and yellow face), a Blackburnian Warbler (with a deep-orange throat that seemed to glow), and a male Blackpoll Warbler (patterned a bit like a chickadee, but with yellow legs). Seeing the warblers as they foraged high in the leaves was no easy task. Clumps of birders stood about, helping one another pinpoint the different species and speaking in quiet tones as they compared notes and asked about the whereabouts of certain target species (“Anybody seen a Goldenwing?”).

The silence of the passage migrants made them difficult to locate. Because wood warblers are, of course, famed for their singing ability, it was a major surprise to learn that here in Texas, northbound passage migrant warblers only rarely, if ever, sing. Instead, in the High Island oak woods, local residents—Gray Catbirds and Carolina Wrens—gave voice. Another surprise for a first-time birder in the High Island woodlots was that the warblers, arriving in the afternoon, mostly disappeared northward after a stopover of a just few hours. By contrast, in the Mid-Atlantic environs, where I had done most of my birding, migrants tended to stay two or three days in a patch of woods before undertaking their next flight northward. On High Island, birds dropped in to feed and bathe but flew off northward shortly after darkness fell, in a rush to reach more productive bottomland forest in the interior.

The warblers at Smith Oaks this afternoon were all passage migrants—fun to see and good practice for the days to come, but they didn’t count toward my warbler quest. So far, I had racked up only one warbler species on its breeding habitat: the Common Yellowthroat, which I had observed at Mad Island on its nesting territory. One down. Thirty-six to go.

CONSERVATION AND RESEARCH EFFORTS

Smith Oaks and Boy Scout Woods form the epicenter of birding on High Island. Owned and managed by the Houston Audubon Society, these two adjacent preserves exemplify the best in volunteerism and private philanthropy on behalf of nature. Based in Houston and citizen-led, the Houston Audubon Society has established seventeen bird sanctuaries in the greater Houston–Galveston area since its founding in 1969, including several woodland sanctuaries on High Island. Houston Audubon’s regional network encompasses more than three thousand acres protected for birds, including Bolivar Flats, southwest of High Island and famed for its beach birds.

Houston Audubon’s High Island sanctuaries are operated entirely by volunteers, most of whom drive daily from their homes in Houston to help out. They manage a visitor center, provide information and guidance to the approximately ten thousand nature-loving visitors who come each year, and maintain the properties and their trails, buildings, blinds, drips, and observation platforms. In 2015, a hundred volunteers donated forty-five hundred hours of their time. The sanctuaries were initiated with a purchase of just four acres by this Audubon Society in 1984, and subsequent purchases and donations by citizens and Amoco Production Company have expanded the properties to their current size—a big deal for birdwatching, bird education, and bird conservation, and all of it powered by local volunteers.

Hundreds of citizens’ organizations throughout America, including this one, promote conservation, education, and nature study, making life better for migratory birds and more interesting for local people. Yet they are just one type among numerous institutions working on behalf of migratory birds and their habitats. Citizens’ groups such as Houston Audubon, state agencies such as the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, nongovernmental conservation organizations such as the Nature Conservancy, corporations such as Amoco Production Company, and statutory research entities such as the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center form part of the picture, but in my journey I also saw the contributions of federal agencies and universities as well as those of national wildlife refuges and state parks, along with intriguing partnerships between citizen groups and corporations that are yielding substantial conservation successes.

Late one day, I drive to the landward side of High Island, returning to Smith Oaks Sanctuary. I stop in a dirt parking lot surrounded by low woods and packed with late-model cars sporting window stickers pledging allegiance to diverse birding and nature organizations. With camera and long lens in hand, I follow trail signs to the sanctuary’s waterbird rookery, situated on a narrow island in Clay Bottom Pond. Before I take many steps, I hear the cacophony of long-legged waders in full breeding mode.

Amoco Production Company donated Clay Bottom Pond and its enclosed island to Houston Audubon in 1994. Both are artificial, the products of industrial activity as well as water management for High Island. When Audubon took ownership, there was no waterbird rookery here, but after a year of habitat restoration and protection, herons showed up. By 1995, fifty pairs of herons nested on the island. By 1998, thirteen thousand birds of various species used the island as a roost. If anything exemplifies the impact of smart conservation planning and action, it is the creation of this safe space for large waterbirds. Set aside appropriate habitat, protect it well, and the wildlife will come.

Houston Audubon constructed a series of observation platforms on the far side of the narrow water passage opposite the nesting island; patrolled by alligators, the passage keeps out pesky predators such as raccoons and opossums, which might consume the eggs of breeding waterbirds. I spent the next hour, with the sun dropping toward the horizon behind me, gazing in amazement and shooting photographs of the crazy commotion on the island. Scores of Great Egrets, Snowy Egrets, Roseate Spoonbills, and Neotropic Cormorants were scattered over the island; big, brightly colored birds were everywhere, some posing, some carrying sticks for nests, some marching about. Pairs courted, and some birds challenged each other in a swirl of nest construction, territorial aggression, display, and sex.

The Great Egrets in particular were stupendous. One male, a lanky and graceful large white bird, raised the gauzy plumes (or aigrettes) on its back and flanks into a wispy tutu and, as its luminous feathers waved in the breeze, snaked its neck up over its back, pointing its beak skyward and then bringing it forward and downward in a long bow. Carried only during the breeding season, a male’s aigrettes are the height of refined and filmy beauty. The delicate, snowy plumes, glowing in the sunlight, looked much like those of a bird of paradise; not surprisingly, fashionable women lusted after these feathers for ornamenting their oversized hats back in the 1890s.

Second in abundance to the Great Egrets were the Roseate Spoonbills. Today they were busy fighting for mates, which they did by dueling with their absurd-looking spatulate bills and waving their pink wings. As they battled, they showed off bright patches of color: an all-white neck; all-pink wings; red flashes on the shoulder, rump, and undertail; and rich ochre at the base of the wing and on the tail. The pale, creamy-green skin of the spoonbill’s bald crown, its orange eyes, and its dark-pink legs all added to the extreme effect. The birds, wildly colored and strange-looking, were gorgeous but also slightly grotesque, more striking than beautiful. Roseate Spoonbills are graceful on the wing, but when a pair battles for a nest site or a female, they’re like two clowns going at it in a circus.

It is shocking to think that in the year 1900, the U.S. populations of both the egret and the spoonbill were virtually exterminated by the commercial plume trade. Frank Chapman wrote in 1904 of the situation in Florida: “I have heard a ‘plume hunter’ boast of killing three hundred herons in a ‘rookery’ in one afternoon. Another proudly stated that he and his companions had killed one hundred thirty thousand birds—herons, egrets, and terns—during one winter.”

Today, because of the good work of organizations such as Houston Audubon and the largesse of corporations such as Amoco Production Company, birders may take the spectacle of waterbird abundance for granted. But if we go back 110 years, things would look quite different. The National Audubon Society was founded in 1905 in large part to address a national crisis: long-legged wading birds (herons, egrets, spoonbills, ibis, and others) were overhunted, mainly to adorn those oversized hats for the fashion-conscious. At the same time, broad-scale and unregulated market hunting of all manner of “game birds” was leading to the disappearance of populations of ducks, geese, swans, shorebirds, and even some songbirds. During this period, the Carolina Parakeet and Passenger Pigeon faded into extinction, mainly because of unrestrained year-round shooting. At the end of the nineteenth century, everything was fair game, not only birds: the Bison was nearly extinct, and hunters all but exterminated White-tailed Deer and Wild Turkey from the remnant forests of the East. Market hunting and the extensive deforestation that took place during and after the Civil War were a one-two punch that reduced wildlife to a shadow of what it had been when the Pilgrims arrived on these shores.

At the eleventh hour, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and George Bird Grinnell spoke out on behalf of protection for threatened species, as well as land conservation, and they founded the Boone & Crockett Club, Sierra Club, and Audubon Society. The last of these focused initially on protecting birds of all sorts through the creation of sanctuaries as well as passage of local and federal laws protecting birds and making the commercial sale of migratory birds illegal. Market hunting and plume collecting were fully banned by 1920, but decades passed before the deeply depressed populations of many species rebounded to the levels we appreciate today. It is remarkable to report that many bird populations—especially waterbirds and raptors—are in better shape today than at any time in the past century. Thanks are due to effective legislation, the creation of sanctuaries, and the natural regeneration of forests on unproductive lands that were abandoned by family subsistence farming in the early decades of the twentieth century.

BIRDS OF ESTUARY AND BEACH

The next morning I turn my energies toward meeting friendly birders, introducing myself to the volunteers who operate the Houston Audubon Society visitor center at Boy Scout Woods. Running into three young leaders of Tropical Birding, a nature-tour group, I learn they lead free bird walks each weekday, and I join them on a trip to the coast. Fifteen of us, plus the guides, caravan to Rollover Pass on the Bolivar Peninsula, nine miles southwest of High Island. Here a small bridge spans a narrow outlet draining Rollover Bay into the Gulf of Mexico. Just north of the bridge is a sandy access road to the bay and, depending on the tide, an abundance of sand flats that attract myriad waterbirds during the late winter and early spring. The guides quickly set spotting scopes on tripods and begin pointing out bird species to the birders—some novices, others experienced, but virtually all of us fifty-five or older. For many of us, recently arrived from the wintry North, this is birding nirvana.

Although the woods of High Island were quiet, the flats swarmed with waterbirds. Eight species of terns rested nearby in flocks or foraged for tiny fish in the shallow bay: Least Tern, Black Tern, Common Tern, Forster’s Tern, Gull-billed Tern, Sandwich Tern, Royal Tern, and Caspian Tern. I had seen all of these species at one time or another, but I had never seen the whole lot all at once and all together. In addition, an impressive group of sandpipers and waders assembled on the flats: American Oystercatcher, American Avocet, Black-necked Stilt, Willet, Long-billed Curlew, Marbled Godwit, and a half-dozen smaller species. Five plover species hunted the flats with their distinct stop-and-start gait: Black-bellied, Wilson’s, Semipalmated, Piping, and Snowy. A hundred Roseate Spoonbills and several Reddish Egrets added to a scene that was much like watching the color plates of a North American birding field guide come to life before us.

Not only were there birds in dense profusion, but many perched right at the edge of the water or in the shallows at close range. Long lenses were drawn and close-ups of all sorts of accommodating waterbirds were rapidly uploaded to storage media of expensive digital SLR cameras. The birders of our little group—many of whom were adding new species to their life lists—quietly uttered a sort of ecstatic gibberish as they moved from one handsome bird to another.

Most remarkably, Rollover Pass is not a reserve of any kind. It is just a particularly fertile estuary where many kinds of habitats converge: seashore, tidal pass, sandflat, and marshland. That said, the profusion of birds here is a result of the nearby array of protected areas scattered in almost every direction. This section of coastal Texas is rich in conservation green spaces, and the birds that breed and roost at night in these areas visit Rollover Pass when the tides produce good meals.

Rollover Pass’s parking lot was filled to capacity, and people of all ages were out and about. They fished, waded in the shallows, dug clams, and lazed by the water—humans and birds and sunshine mixing in an happy outdoor tableau. Of course, the birding group stood out from the others: most of us were gray-haired and swathed in baggy clothing made of drab-olive miracle fiber sold at great expense by online outdoor outfitters. We wore wide-brimmed floppy hats, some with French Foreign Legion–style sun protectors draping over the neck and onto the back. Compared to the clammers nearby—barefoot, in shorts, mostly shirtless—we birders seemed almost a distinct species.

After about an hour of high-octane birding, our leaders pulled the plug. They were hungry and decided to head to a famous taco truck down the road at Crystal Beach. I followed. The cilantro-flavored beef tacos were as stunning as the birds at Rollover Pass, and we washed them down with sweet, mandarin-flavored Mexican soda.

Afterward I drove down the peninsula to Bolivar Flats for beach birding with a conservationist twist. I was scheduled to meet Kacy Ray of the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) and learn about her team’s work conserving beach-nesting birds, which they carry out on the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas. Ray partners with local organizations to deploy paid field staff and volunteers who address local threats to the Wilson’s Plover, Snowy Plover, Black Skimmer, and Least Tern, comely waterbirds that build nests in the sand just above the high tideline and thus are vulnerable to beachgoers, unleashed dogs, motorized vehicles, and predators such as raccoons, coyotes, and gulls. The work must be carried out every spring and summer, year in and year out. Ray is a conservation warrior on the front lines, and her fighting spirit is admirable.

Today Ray planned to visit Kristen Vale and Stephanie Bilodeau, ABC–Houston Audubon shorebird technicians who were banding Wilson’s Plovers on Bolivar Flats in order to monitor and conserve this declining species. For each such threatened beach-nesting species, Ray’s teams locate and monitor nesting sites, fence them off to keep the public and beach drivers from destroying the nests, address predator issues, and conduct public outreach to educate beachgoers on how to avoid harming the nests and young during breeding season.

I watched Vale and Bilodeau trap and color-band nesting pairs of Wilson’s Plovers on a stretch of sand above the tideline, using a simple box trap adjacent to the nest that was tripped by a string pulled by Vale when a bird passed underneath (talk about low-tech). By banding these birds with unique color combinations, they can then identify individuals, better estimate the total number of birds, breeding pairs, and territories, and assess long-term survival and interregional movements.

ABC, founded in 1994 and built upon productive partnerships such as the one Ray is implementing, today spearheads an array of innovative programs that conserve native bird populations in the Americas, addressing threats posed by habitat destruction, pesticides, feral cats, wind turbines, urban lighting, window strikes, and more. Moreover, ABC has driven the nationwide Partners in Flight collaboration—a network of scores of government and nongovernment institutions working for conservation of migratory songbirds. Later in the spring, I would visit an ABC field project in Minnesota that is creating new breeding habitat for the Golden-winged Warbler, another Neotropical migrant under threat.

ANAHUAC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE

The next morning, I find that Boy Scout Woods is again migrant free. I decide to head to Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, just northwest of High Island, where I’m joined by Jared Keyes, an ace birder with a sharp ear whom I know from springtime birding in another famous migrant trap: New York’s Central Park. We drive slowly along the refuge’s wildlife loop south of the visitor center. It’s noisy with common species: Boat-tailed and Great-tailed Grackles, Common Gallinules, Neotropic Cormorants, Red-winged Blackbirds, Marsh Wrens, and Savannah Sparrows. The loop passes through freshwater wetlands filled with various marsh grasses and reeds. In an East Texas April, this sort of habitat bursts with birdlife—birds are everywhere, perching prominently and vocalizing. But we’re hunting hard-to-find rare species.

“Least Bittern!” Keyes called out, and I jerked the car to a stop at the edge of a waterway. We happily glassed the bird, the smallest and most reclusive of the herons; honey-brown, with a blackish cap, the tiny species is a treat to encounter because of its rarity. This individual’s dark back indicated it was an adult male. We watched the bittern clamber gingerly among the reeds, hunting small aquatic vertebrates. Perhaps it had just arrived here from a winter sojourn in Mexico. I had not seen this species in four decades, so I was most pleased with my tripmate, who was proving to be an excellent spotter.

I drove less than a mile more before Keyes yelled again. “Stop the car!” He had heard the call of a Black Rail. I veered to the side of the gravel road, and we both hopped out. A trilled kih-kee-kerrd came from thick marsh grass near a fence line about ten paces from the car. We crept close. The Black Rail is one of those super-elusive species that makes it onto birders’ most-wanted short lists; nonmigratory, it is restricted to coastal salt marshes and rarely leaves the cover of thick marsh grass. Neither Keyes nor I had ever seen one.

We stood on either side of the tussock of grass that hid the tiny marsh dweller and waited for it to show itself. It wasn’t interested. Our patience depleted after twenty minutes, we headed back to the car. We had communed with the vocalizing little creature from a distance of a couple of yards, and that was OK with us. It’s good to leave some birding ambitions to a future date, and hearing this small recluse at close range was almost as good as seeing it.

Our final stop of the morning was Jackson Prairie Woodlot, a tiny strip of trees planted on a sliver of raised ground in the middle of this vast, treeless marshland. We could walk its perimeter in about ten minutes. A few migrant songbirds sheltered here in the late morning—Blue Grosbeak, Indigo Bunting, Black-throated Green Warbler, Blue-headed Vireo, and several Summer Tanagers. Seeing the place’s potential, I decided to return on an afternoon more favorable to an arrival of songbirds from across the Gulf.

I returned alone around 3:30 p.m. the next day, keeping in mind how unpredictable the arrival of migrants can be; often it is best to simply go out into the field armed with no more than hope and a pair of binoculars. The weather forecast indicated conditions—fair skies, light southerly winds—favorable to an arrival of migrants from the Yucatán. I worked the perimeter of the woodlot and found small flocks of Indigo Buntings and Blue Grosbeaks flitting around the outer edges of the woods, and warblers and vireos foraging in the shady interior.

Then I looked southward from the southern tip of the woodlot and saw, through my binoculars, groups of buntings and tanagers moving north up the road from the coast. They passed over me and dove into the trees of the woodlot—the only trees within a mile or more. More and more birds appeared from the south, crossing the broad stretch of marshland sometimes twenty or thirty at a time: Summer Tanagers, more Blue Grosbeaks and Indigo Buntings, Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, and Dickcissels. Many of these migrants had just completed their trans-Gulf flight and were making their first landfall. Many of the wood warblers fell into the woodlot from great heights, so high I missed the moment of their arrival. But they were creating their own little fall-out—just what I had come to Texas to witness.

After an hour, the woodlot was vibrating with birds: thirteen species of warblers, two species of orioles, two tanagers, two grosbeaks, Yellow-billed Cuckoos, two wary thrush species, and many flocks of Indigo Buntings. Birds lurked in every tree. Birds shuffled on the ground in the shadows. Everywhere I looked I saw birds—good birds. I circuited the woods five more times and with each pass saw dozens and dozens of migrants. Each circuit added new species to my list. The little woodlot was filled to its brim with migrant birds fresh off the Gulf crossing.

Yet the next morning, when I again returned to the woodlot, I found it empty. Like a vessel, the woods had filled with birds the preceding afternoon and emptied over the evening hours as the recent arrivals, rested and fed, moved northward into the interior, bound for more capacious and lush woodlands, perhaps along the Trinity River bottomlands north of here. Thinking back to the preceding afternoon’s fall-out, I was elated by the immediacy and excitement of those ninety minutes in Jackson Prairie Woodlot; I had experienced a fall-out first-hand and had witnessed the songbirds coming in off the Gulf.

NUNEZ WOODS AND THE HURRICANE LANDS

From High Island, I drive eastward to the central coast of Louisiana to visit another bird-banding operation, this one at Grand Chenier. In the brooding weather, the journey is one of overwhelming gloom as I pass amid the grim artifacts of the petroleum industry and the commercial fishery along the roadside, set in vast expanses of bayou and marshland with abundant evidence of hurricane destruction. As I drive, I’m thrashed by a nasty storm that follows me along the coast—a common feature of the Deep South in springtime. When I reach Port Arthur, the low black clouds, flashing lightning, and hundreds of smoke-belching refinery stacks create an infernal scene. I traverse Sabine Pass and Sabine Lake and cross into Louisiana by midafternoon. Route 82 eastward takes me to Holly Beach, where a tiny ferry carries me over Calcasieu Bayou to Cameron. I pass no cars on the road this afternoon, and I have rarely felt so lonely. To say this is backcountry is an understatement—Route 82 across the exposed underbelly of Louisiana is a land that time forgot.

I paused my journey in Creole, where a solitary bright spot awaited me: the Bayou Fuel Stop general store. Here I sampled two finger-food Cajun delicacies: boudin blanc sausage and boudin balls, both composed of ground pork meat and liver, dirty rice, and Cajun spices. Boudin blanc, the standard Acadian sausage of southern Louisiana, is stuffed into a pork casing and steamed in a rice cooker; it’s called blanc because it lacks the pork blood of boudin noir. Boudin balls are small spheres of the same ingredients but dipped in batter and deep-fried. (Those who wish to sample such treats should attend the Boudin Cook-Off, held every October in Lafayette, Louisiana—try the seafood boudin, which includes crab and shrimp.)

In the late afternoon, I arrived at Grand Chenier, a small coastal community about 150 miles west of New Orleans, to visit Rockefeller State Wildlife Refuge, the base of operations for Frank Moore’s migratory bird-banding team in Evariste Nunez Woods and Bird Sanctuary. Moore, a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, set up the banding project in Nunez Woods in the spring of 2015 after operating at Johnson’s Bayou, to the west, from 1993 to 2014. The program is a collaboration between his university and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, and I was one of its first visitors. The privately owned Nunez Woods, managed by the Rockefeller Refuge, is a mile-long strip of hardwoods surrounded by marshland and pasture. As the only substantial patch of forest within miles, it is a target for incoming trans-Gulf migrant songbirds.

Named for its stands of oaks (chene is “oak” in French), Grand Chenier is set along an ancient Gulf beach ridge stranded inland by erosion and the historic deltaic processes of the Mississippi River. The ridge’s slight elevation encourages diverse upland woody vegetation to take root and thrive here, while it cannot in the adjacent lower marshy areas. As in High Island, here in southern Louisiana the landscape is dominated by marshland and coastal prairie, with only a few small patches of oak woodlands, which act as songbird migrant traps in spring.

Along with Water Oaks, Live Oaks are the dominant tree species at Nunez Woods, providing both habitat for trans-Gulf migrants and important protection from hurricane-driven storm surges and flooding. The best chenier woodlands are filled with Live Oaks, many-branched, pleasing to the eye, and beloved by warblers, which forage in them for insect prey. These trees are perhaps the most important native tree in the culture of the Deep South, not least because of their broad and shady branches, many of which stretch out from the trunk nearly horizontally, creating a wide crown and a network of limbs friendly to climbers. Their thick, small, hardy evergreen leaves form a dome of foliage, mimicking the broad porches seen in small towns across the Deep South, and their shade is a valuable commodity in late spring and summer in the hot zone. Their widespread presence makes them a symbol of the South itself, and their natural “tinsel” of Spanish Moss gives small towns their antebellum look, mesmerizing northern visitors such as myself.

Yet there is another omnipresent symbol in these coastal areas: the harsh scars of hurricanes past. For people inhabiting the Gulf coastline from Galveston east to New Orleans, the names Katrina (2005), Rita (2005), and Ike (2008) bring back terrible memories. There are few locations along this stretch that did not suffer the impact of one or more of these damaging cyclonic storms. Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge and the Bolivar Peninsula took a vicious hit from Ike and are still recovering, which will take decades (not to mention the restoration that will be necessary in the wake of 2017’s Hurricane Harvey). The works department can rebuild roads and buildings, but natural habitats recover at their own pace.

Rita, the most intense tropical cyclone ever to cross the Gulf of Mexico, made landfall at Sabine Pass on the Texas-Louisiana border on September 24, 2005. A fifteen-foot storm surge struck the coast of southwestern Louisiana, sweeping away most buildings near the shoreline and flooding a vast swath of low country with saltwater. The Louisiana communities of Cameron, Creole, Grand Chenier, Holly Beach, Johnson Bayou, Little Chenier, and Oak Grove received the brunt of the blow, with 90 percent of their homes, businesses, and infrastructure destroyed. More than a decade later, Cameron Parish communities south of the Intracoastal Waterway are still slowly recovering, their populations greatly diminished from pre-Rita levels.

Ike made landfall near High Island on September 13, 2008, slamming the coasts of the Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston Island and spreading its damage eastward into Louisiana, which was still attempting to recover from the violence inflicted by Rita just three years earlier, as well as Hurricane Gustav, which had struck the states only two weeks before Ike. It is presumably the recurrent destruction wrought by hurricanes that keeps this section of Gulf Coast as low marshland with few woodlands, which are killed by saltwater inundation. Coastal habitat loss is just one more challenge that the trans-Gulf migrant songbirds face each spring.

Refuge wildlife biologist Samantha Collins gave me a tour of Rockefeller, which is mainly marshlands and water impoundments constructed to provide foraging habitat for wintering waterfowl. Encompassing seventy-six thousand acres on the south side of Route 82 and extending to the Gulf, Rockefeller is a popular destination for birdwatching, sport fishing, and recreational crabbing and shrimping. Moreover, the refuge is an important wintering ground for waterfowl. As many as ten thousand Snow Geese winter here, as do thousands of Gadwalls, Green-winged Teal, Northern Shovelers, Ring-necked Ducks, and Northern Pintails. The waterfowl population tops 170,000 at the height of the winter season. No waterfowl hunting is permitted in Rockefeller, but in the surrounding private lands, the birds are fair game.

The refuge manages an alligator breeding program, and staff also oversee the statewide farming of alligators and a managed annual harvest of wild gators. After we visited the covered breeding pens, where dozens of cute young gators bobbed about, we drove down the gravel dikes of the impoundments. The place was alive with springtime birds—I goggled at flocks of White Ibis, waterfowl, egrets, and herons flushed out by the sound of the truck.

Last, Collins showed me Nunez Woods itself—tall, wet, and quite lush and tropical, it reminded me a bit of the New Guinea jungles I’d explored over the course of my career. I had a good feeling about it, even though it now lay quiet before us.

The next morning, I met the bird-banding team—Keegan Tranquillo, Shawn Sullivan, and Lauren Granger—and we caravanned to the Nunez Woods banding camp, on the north side of Route 82. Nunez, a private and gated hunting property, is seasonally open to birders. A mix of field and woods, it’s thick with deer stands (as in Texas, hunting and fishing are Louisiana’s main pastimes). The forest includes Live Oak, Water Oak, Southern Prickly Ash, Green Ash, Southern Hackberry, American Elm, and Chinese Tallow. Saw Palmetto dominates the understory. These woods, with trees topping seventy-five feet, form a long strip about a quarter-mile wide. In the shaded interior, the bird-banding team cut a network of trails along which they deployed mist nets. I would wander these paths repeatedly over the next few days.

Nunez is a world unto itself. A few local resident birds sang this morning—resident Northern Cardinals and Carolina Wrens as well as territorial White-eyed Vireos and Wood Thrushes, Neotropical migrants that nest here. Virtually none of the northbound passage migrants vocalized. Instead the silent migrants skulked in the shadows, making it difficult to locate them. This raised a biological question in my mind: what mechanism prompts male migrants to sing as they head north to their breeding ground? While birding in the Mid-Atlantic, my experience had been that male migrant songbirds sing while in passage. Yet here in the Deep South, that was not the case. So what does prompt migrating males to start singing? It may be a hormonal shift impelled by the position of the sun at the birds’ breeding latitude, but future research is needed to understand the onset of male song during the spring passage north.

Surprisingly, a flock of White-throated Sparrows perched in a thicket at the woodland edge. This species breeds throughout the Great North Woods and winters in the Mid-Atlantic; it is a common winter yard bird to many people living in the East. I certainly did not expect to find it at the edge of a swampy subtropical woodland on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, where a Great Kiskadee called kik—keweer! from the forest canopy. I realized that I was, in fact, encountering these sparrows at the extreme southern edge of their winter range. The familiar birds were still wintering here while Neotropical migrant songbirds were going north—an interesting kind of two-way traffic. The sparrows would eventually head back north to nest in Ontario and the Adirondacks, but they were in no hurry. They stayed quiet, although I’d later hear them practice their song at points north along the Mississippi, and I looked forward to hearing their haunting five-note whistle once I reached the North Woods.

Tranquillo reported that there had recently been a decent migrant arrival. He showed me netted Kentucky, Hooded, and Swainson’s Warbler individuals as well as a colorful male Painted Bunting. I’d arrived at Nunez at the beginning of the high season for songbirds coming across the Gulf. As was the case at High Island, these birds were arriving from their overwater journey in the afternoons—the birds I’d spotted this morning had arrived on an earlier afternoon and were resting and refueling before continuing northward into the heart of the continent. The woodland here (unlike the tiny woodland patches of High Island) was large enough to keep the migrants around for a few days. The netting team captured seventy-five birds that busy day at their banding camp, situated in a screen tent tucked into the southern edge of the woods. Tranquillo processed birds throughout the morning and afternoon, and out in the woods Sullivan and Granger pulled birds from the nets almost continually.

I added a second breeding warbler to my quest list: the Northern Parula. I found the tiny canopy-dweller in a Spanish moss–draped Live Oak in the interior of the woods. This, the smallest wood warbler, is an energetic vocalist that prefers high-canopy twigs for its singing and foraging. Blue-gray, yellow, and white, the species is distinguished by its dark collar, broken white eye-ring, white wing-bars, and the yellowish patch on its back. It is interesting that no wood warblers besides this one breed in the coastal woodlands—the habitat simply must not provide enough breeding-season sustenance to support these voracious insect-eaters. Yet the Northern Parula is one of the most widespread and adaptable of the warblers, breeding in coastal Live Oaks as well as the North Woods boreal forests. I would encounter this little sprite again in various places along my route to Canada.

On my second morning at Grand Chenier, I saw flocks of small, dark birds moving along the woodland edge as I drove down the entrance track to Nunez Woods. There had been a migrant arrival at the end of the preceding day, and now the woods, edges, and grasslands hosted hundreds of Indigo Buntings, White-eyed Vireos, and Summer Tanagers. Several other migrant species were everywhere—Kentucky and Hooded Warblers, Scarlet Tanagers, and Blue Grosbeaks.

Birding in Nunez Woods was fascinating because of its strange ornithological juxtapositions. This morning, two distinct ecosystems intersected: as I stood in the forest, looking at Hooded Warblers on the ground and Summer Tanagers in the canopy vegetation, I could see large waterbirds just above the treetops, winging over our little patch of woods. White Ibises, Tricolored Herons, and Great Egrets were on the move from one large wetland to another. One does not expect to be able to watch furtive wood warblers and colorful herons on the same spot of habitat, but this is the kind of treat birders encounter in southernmost Louisiana.

The Nunez team was excited by the presence of a male Cerulean Warbler foraging prominently in a big Live Oak just around the bend from the banding station. Indeed, blues, as well as reds, were to be the themes of this day. Bunches of all-red male Summer Tanagers foraged in the forest and loafed at the edge of the woods. Flocks of Indigo Buntings, joined by larger Blue Grosbeaks, foraged low in the grass and flushed up into the bushes and trees at the edge of the woods each time I walked by. Nervous flocks of twenty to thirty deep-blue bunting and grosbeak males were joined by the brown females of the two species, and the two-tone flocks started up from the field in a dozen intermittent explosions of deep blue and buff brown. To date on my trip, I had recorded 166 bird species without expending much effort—I’d just put myself at the right places at the right times.

On this trip, as I would discover, flocks of Indigo Buntings followed me up the Mississippi Valley to their northern breeding limit at the Canadian border. This bunting—the male a deep ocean blue and the size of a small sparrow—became my colorful little mascot: I’d encountered small groups of them at Jackson Prairie Woodlot, and there were flocks of dozens here. As a youngster in Baltimore, I had found singing Indigo Buntings on territory in virtually every woodland clearing I explored. I loved their complex and rollicking song—an insistent sweet-sweet…, followed by four distinct repeated phrases—but, because of their abundance, I’d taken the birds for granted. Now, on this long road trip, I was regaining respect for the bright little songbirds, mainly because of their flocking habit and their omnipresence. Here was a Neotropical migrant, one that wintered in Mexico and the Caribbean, that was truly prospering, and I saluted their success as travelers and widespread North American breeders.

Meanwhile the Nunez Woods banding crew was hard at work. Wearing tall rubber boots, they slogged the woodland trails almost continuously as yet another rainstorm pounded the paths into a deep slurry of soft mud and standing water. The nets were catching lots of migrants and there was no time to shift them to a drier set of trails, but the joy of intimate encounters with the diversity of colorful songbirds dulled the annoyance of the all-encompassing mud. The staff and I were paying a small price for a unique experience.

The data on fat and muscle condition that Tranquillo collected from the netted birds indicated that the migrants had arrived in good shape after their Gulf crossing, and the birds I spotted out and about appeared fine, despite the nasty weather they had encountered. Even the tiny hummingbirds seemed unaffected by the Gulf crossing. Of course, their health shouldn’t have been a surprise. Natural selection has operated on these songbirds for thousands of generations, and the results of that process are clear: the trans-Gulf route is their best route north.

I had now completed my southern coastal tour. My count of wood warblers on their breeding grounds remained at two, but I knew that about a dozen species bred in the extensive interior forests of the Mississippi bottomlands, where I was headed next. I had observed along the coast a number of passage migrants on their way to the Great North Woods to breed—Swainson’s Thrush, Blackpoll and Magnolia Warblers, and Philadelphia Vireo, among others. The wood warblers would lead me north week by week. Heading north from Nunez Woods, I would next hunt for productive migrant stopover sites in the Deep South’s interior. Ahead of me lay the Mississippi’s once vast and forbidding ancient bottomland forests, at one time the land of the Cougar, the Red Wolf, and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.