At Pete’s Pond! Not the little birds bouncing around in the bushes, but big ones, standing right in the edge of the water. Not the Francolins running around squabbling, we’ve seen them before on Maui. They’re not native to Maui, they were imported, but now wander the grounds of expensive resorts, chuckling and trumpeting each morning, making it sound like a tropical jungle. No. I saw an Emperor Goose, a native of Europe, standing in the shallows. We saw one once before on the Texas Coast. We puzzled over it for days, knowing it was something exotic, something that didn't belong in South Texas. We knew it wasn't just some stray bird, having lost its way during some windblown migration, because he was with another bird totally out of context, a black necked swan. The black necked swan was easier to figure out. He's a native of South America, and we found him on the web within a day. For some reason the Emperor Goose took longer, but we knew there was something unusual going on to have two exotic birds, from two different parts of the world, floating free in the shallows of the Laguna Madre. We found out later that there is an exotic bird collector in the neighborhood of Rockport/Fulton, and you have to be careful about counting any unusual birds you see in the neighborhood. Given that, we had to give back the Mute Swan out of range we had identified and counted the year before.
Not that we can count the Emperor Goose we saw on the internet on our North American Life List, but sitting here in Basalt Colorado, I got to see a bird on the other side of the planet, compliments of an internet webcam, and recognize it! How cool is that.
