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Dawn Chorus: Migration on the Upper Texas Coast [1]
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Date: 2025-05-25
Hello birders, twitchers, twitchy birders, bitchy twirlers, and anyone looking for a respite from our bird-brained politics.
Texas’s world-famous spring migration coincides with the busiest part of the academic year, so usually I’m beset with FOMO — wait, there’s no fear, it’s literally just “MO” — as I see birders posting their warbler pics while I’m five hours north grading GPT-generated term papers. Fortunately, this year’s late Easter afforded me a long weekend to hit the road during peak migration.
The Texas Gulf Coast has three renowned birding regions. From southwest to northeast (and in order of migrant arrivals), they are: 1) The Lower Rio Grande Valley, where the river empties into the Gulf of MEXICO; 2) the Central Texas Coast, anchored by Corpus Christi and Aransas Bay; and 3) the Upper Texas Coast, spanning both sides of Galveston Bay and northeast to the Louisiana border.
It’s never a boredwalk in late April on the Smith Oaks Sanctuary boardwalk, one of many highlights of the Upper Texas Coast.
The Upper Coast alone is too expansive for a three-night trip, so I chose to stick to the east side of the Bay. Winnie, an Interstate-10 pit-stop town an hour east of Houston, is a convenient home base for all of the easternmost sites, provided that you don’t mind your Burger Kings housed in gas stations and don’t filter your hotel searches to show only those with good reviews (in fairness, the Holiday Inn Express was adequate, and swarming with birders).
On the way to Winnie, I stopped at W.G. Jones State Forest, a small tract of piney woods surrounded on all sides by Houston suburbs. It is managed by Texas A&M and known for housing a breeding population of the rare Red-cockaded Woodpecker. This is a lifer that should be easy — I mean, they actually paint a green stripe on each tree in which one has nested, and they hand out detailed maps with all of the known pecker zones. Yet, during a quiet midday stop, I managed to whiff. Oh well. I did see my first Upside-down Squeaky Pecker (Brown-headed Nuthatch) in about 20 years, and I logged my first warbler of the trip, a Pine.
Not an auspicious start to my warbtography.
I could have stayed longer, but the coast was calling. I checked into the hotel, had a quick dinner, and headed to Smith Oaks Sanctuary, a beautiful wooded preserve on High Island, 20 minutes south of Winnie on a never-crowded road. I ended up spending all three evenings at Smith Oaks, which is uncharacteristic of my restless birding style. But it’s just a fantastic site, managed by Houston Audubon and known mainly for its enormous rookery with an ungodly number of Snowy Egrets, Tricolored Herons, Western Cattle-Egrets, Neotropic Cormorants, and of course the majestic Roseate Spoonbills.
If your name has “tricolored” in it, I feel like the colors should be more distinct.
Snowy Egret and fuzzies.
It’s also a great place to see White Ibises, Black-crowned Night Herons, and Purple Gallinules:
In other countries, birds of this genus are called moorhens, marsh hens, or native hens. But of course we’re America, so we give it an abstruse name.
In addition to the rookery, its beautiful mixed woodlands — aided by an impressive boardwalk from which to see into the canopy — are a great migrant trap. I saw both types of cuckoos:
Yellow-billed and Black-billed
Both types of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks:
Girl and Boy
Only my third Yellow-throated Vireo ever, and a Summer Tanager making me envious of its dinner:
The true stars of the show, however, are the warblers. Although it’s epistemically dubious to pick a favorite warbler, Hooded Warblers have been my favorite since I saw a picture of one in my first field guide 27 years ago. I was getting ready to move from Phoenix to North Carolina, and I used the book to fantasize about which eastern birds I wanted to see. The Hooded’s picture jumped out at me — and, sure enough, within a few weeks of moving, a male bounced through the pear tree in front of my apartment window. “That was easy” I said, and then didn’t see another one for 23 years. Fortunately, the suspense didn’t last long, as I chased a beautiful male around the boardwalk in the photography-hostile dusk light of the first evening. I also saw a Chestnut-sided Warbler:
A Northern Parula:
And a Black-and-white Warbler.
That was just the warm-up, though. I woke up early the next morning, well before dawn’s crack had exposed herself, to make the 50-minute drive to a world-class warbler tavern.
Sabine Woods Sanctuary is a 27-acre oasis of large oaks in the middle of an uninhabited swath of coastal prairie just minutes from the Louisiana border. Managed by the Texas Ornithological Society, it stands alongside Quintana Neotropical Bird Sanctuary and Lafitte’s Cove Nature Preserve — both southwest of Galveston and worth their own weekend trip — as one of the best migrant traps on the Upper Coast.
And trapped they were! I saw 17 warbler species in about 7 hours, a day rivaled only by my first day at Ohio’s Magee Marsh in 2019. This wasn’t even a fallout, as the southerly winds that characterized my entire trip probably pushed hoards of migrants farther north. This was just a late-April day at Sabine Woods.
Among the highlights were my best-ever pictures of a Worm-eating Warbler:
In Australia they have warbler-eating worms.
Kentucky Warbler:
The only U.S. states with a warbler named after them are Kentucky, Tennessee, Connecticut, Louisiana, and Canada.
Yellow-throated Warbler:
Blackpoll Warbler:
Not to be confused with the Blackpool Warbler, a British songbird that frequents touristy beaches.
Common Yellowthroat:
And Blue-winged Warbler:
That doesn’t look blue to me — but I don’t make the rules.
I also got my first-ever picture of a Louisiana Waterthrush. This was only my second sighting of one (I got the lifer a year ago behind my parents’ house in Virginia, on one of those “I don’t feel like packing my camera” trips):
Speaking of lifers — coming into the trip, I had seen all but two of the 40 warbler species that regularly migrate through or nest in Texas (some of my sightings have been in other states). I was missing only a Colima Warbler, a Mexican species found in a tiny, hard-to-access section of Big Bend National Park, and a Swainson’s Warbler, an elusive understory skulker that migrates through southern and far-eastern Texas. It took nearly the whole day to find it after rumors of one appearing in the morning, but I was able to check Swainson’s off my list. Beyond Texas, it was my 49th New World/Parulidae warbler. An August trip to southeastern Arizona should give me #50.
Kind of a drab fellow after all that hype.
The most common warbler of the trip was the Prothonotary. Experts counted as many as 30 at Sabine Woods that day. I’m fairly conservative with my counts, because I’m never sure if I’m seeing the same one over and over — but my estimation is that I saw an ass-ton of them:
Prothonotary Warblers are in a genus that includes the Abecedarian, Corpuscular, and Confiscatory Warblers.
Incredibly, the second most common was my seldom-seen and much-fantasized-about Hooded. I had completely whiffed on them during my 2023 Gulf Coast trip, so I was staying guarded. But, after seeing one the night before, I couldn’t get away from them at Sabine (not that I was trying):
I used “Hooded Warbler” as a social-media handle for a brief moment before realizing that the “Hooded” part could be confusing (and, in retrospect, too on-the-nose for Twitter).
Bath time:
Which one represents your mood today?
And don’t forget the girls!
“Painted Buntings, Northern Cardinals, and I started the ‘oh darn, it’s a female’ support group.”
Speaking of co-ed warblers, here are a couple of American Redstarts:
“Hey honey, you should join that support group.”
“Say that again and I’m gonna hybridize with that Tennessee over there.”
Beyond the yellow-heavy warblers, the rest of the rainbow was well represented at Sabine Woods as well. I saw an Indigo Bunting:
“Indigo is actually in the rainbow. Eat your heart out, Purple Finches.”
Baltimore Oriole:
Scarlet Tanager:
Has won more games in recent seasons than the bird above it.
And of course the bird that is a rainbow unto itself, a Painted Bunting (no pics). I also found an unusually cooperative White-eyed Vireo:
Per-chicka-reeree! Sweet frappuccini bottom!
The big outing on my second and final full day was to a national wildlife refuge between Houston and Winnie. You may be familiar with the name Jocelyn Nungaray. If not, then your Fox News-addicted uncle surely is. She was the 12-year-old Houston girl who was raped and murdered by two undocumented immigrants last year, leading to saturation coverage in right-wing media. Never missing an opportunity to politicize someone’s private grief, President Trump signed an executive order early this year renaming Anahuac NWR to Jocelyn Nungaray NWR — an incongruous name change, to put it nicely. But anyhow, it’s a beautiful facility featuring a 2-mile driving loop around a large pond.
Visitors this spring are greeted by a rare treat before they even leave the Visitor’s Center area. A pair of American Barn Owls nested in the roof of a ramada just off the main parking lot. Although the parents are never seen during the day, they produced four fuzzies who are reliably on display:
I named the two on the left Ana and Huac.
That was actually a lifer for me — #2 of the trip. After that, I walked along a pollinator trail and saw a Couch’s Kingbird, a Common Yellowthroat, and an Orchard Oriole:
“More like Tortured Oriole, amirite?” -The Baltimore Oriole above
I then hit the driving loop to see a wide variety of waterbirds, and also waternotbirds:
There were dozens of Long-billed Dowitchers staggered throughout the wetlands:
Lots of Stilts, Stilt Sandpipers, Gallinules, Yellowlegs, and both types of Whistling-Ducks, including Fulvous:
Propped up by two Stilt Sandpipers
I also got a nice shot of an Eastern Kingbird from the car window:
The eastern ones come off as rude at first, but can be genuine and friendly once you get to know them.
As darkness set in on my final evening at Smith Oaks, I saw this precious Prothonotary Warbler tucked in for the night after a long day of performing for humans:
That seemed like such a perfect capstone to a great trip that I shut the camera off so it would be the last photo I took on the Gulf Coast.
Of course, I did have some unfinished business for the drive home. I got up extra early so I could revisit Pecker Fail State Forest during the more active early morning and still get home in time for Easter dinner with the in-laws. Fortunately, it is only 90 minutes north of Winnie. Unfortunately, it started raining when I arrived, and most of my allotted two hours was spent sheltered from the lightning and downpour.
When the rain lightened and I thought I heard squeaking, I ventured into the forest. My binoculars, camera, and eye glasses were all getting wet, and I was having trouble locating the source of the sound. But after a few minutes, this lady dropped down to just above my eye level and put on a nice show:
Red-cockaded Woodpecker
I still don’t know what a cockade is — and this female had no red on it anywhere. But I got my third lifer of the trip and was a happy man as I had my BBQ lunch in a Buc-ee’s parking lot off I-45. Here is the Texas-themed conclusion you asked for — let me know if you need any modifications or ideas for other bird-themed travelogues on a progressive community blog.
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