Tuesday, April 3, 2001

Use spring to become a better birder by summer

   Some spring things birders should do this week:

• Clean birdbaths and feeders. If the martin house has not been cleaned, it is too late. Martins are here. Hummer feeders should be put up if they have not been up all winter. The recipe for syrup is one cup of sugar to four cups of water; boil for a few minutes. No red coloring is necessary. The red on the feeders is enough to attract birds.
• Study the wood warblers. "The Sibley Guide to Birds: Field Identification," is great for study but most birders prefer a smaller volume such as "The National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America," to carry in the field. By the time you are reading this column, migrants will have been arriving for several weeks.
• Go to the beach. Shore birds are our first arrivals. Look for red knots in the surf. They should be there in small flocks, running into the waves and out, each bird in perfect synchronization with the next. Their breasts will be starting to turn red.
  Beside them may be ruddy turnstones in harlequin patterns, with red legs and feet. Groups of black headed laughing gulls will be gathered with terns, Sandwich terns, tiny least terns, larger Caspian terns with dark orange bills, and royal terns with golden yellow bills.

Perfect for spring

   A solitary black-bellied plover may actually have a black belly now that spring is here. Small, feisty sanderlings, shaped like small knots, will be chasing each other.

   On the way back, scan any plowed fields you may pass for lesser golden plovers and long necked upland sandpipers. Look over plowed fields also for swallow like black terns. Keep an eye out overhead for Franklin’s gulls, a prairie species that migrates in flocks at this season. You will recognize them by the lacey white windows on their black wingtips. Otherwise they resemble laughing gulls.

   Birding is about paying attention, turning on to what is happening, about listening and noticing. It is the perfect spring activity. If you see a little bird carrying something in its bill, it probably has a stick to add to the others already gathered to make a nest. Notice if you see a male great-tailed grackle, grazing nicely with a companion or two, suddenly double his size, lift his wings over his head as he makes it into a shocking, scary, black feather helmet. This bird is trying to make an impression. The other birds may ignore it, but if you are interested in birds, you should know it is displaying a courtship thing, a spring thing.

   If you are walking by the bay in the evening and see a loose formation of birds flying low over the water in a northerly direction, they may be egrets or herons, traveling, sometimes in mixed flocks. When you go out in the morning to pick up the paper, listen to the mockingbird, listen to the low, pleasing voices of the doves. If there is another tiny, eloquent voice, try to see who speaks. It could be a northern parula, a warbler, warming up for its courting days soon to begin a little farther north of here.

   EVENTS

• The Coastal Bend Chapter of the Audubon Society will meet tonight at the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History at 7 p.m. Everyone is welcome to attend.
• Spring Bird Walks have started in Blucher Park. Sponsored by the Audubon Outdoor Club, they begin at daybreak on Saturdays and Sundays in April (except April 15, for Easter.) They end when no more birds are being seen or exhaustion sets in.

  

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Phyllis Yochem, a Corpus Christi resident, has studied birds in Texas since 1960.

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