Saturday

A warm windy Saturday. A day-trip. Birding is a good excuse for a drive. We could go north to look for the lesser black backed gull at Port O’Connor, or south for the purple sandpiper on the South Padre Island Jetty (he’s still there). Last time we went south to the jetty for the sandpiper, it was too windy and waves were blowing across the rocks. Windy today. We went north to Port O’Connor.

The lesser black backed gull is not a normal bird for here. Word gets around when one is spotted. There is one in Port O’Connor eighty miles north, and one at the Corpus Christi Dump. The one at the dump is closer, but we decided we’d rather search for the one at Port O’Conner.

This gull stands out. He’s bigger than most of the gulls on the South Texas Coast. Spot a large gull and it’s either a herring gull or the gull we’re looking for. After an hour we found one large gull but it was a juvenile herring gull. We had to look up the details to make sure it wasn’t our gull. The next oversized gull we found, however, was definitely the lesser black backed gull.

An hour and a half north on Highway 35 past Rockport, Fulton, Holiday Beach, and Tivoli, then east past Seadrift to Port O’Connor. You can’t go to Port O’Connor on the way to anywhere else. You have to want to go there. It’s a dead-end at the end of the peninsula. Another hour and a half to find the gull. He was halfway between the fishing pier and the Port O’Connor jetty. By lunch we were back to civilization in Port Lavaca, at the bird sanctuary park, having lunch and a walk on the marsh boardwalk.

So we haven’t had a successful purple sandpiper search yet, but we did get a lifer today. The lesser black backed gull. One more for our life-list.