North on the Wing

by Bruce M. Beehler

  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 for
est 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.