The great mountain plover hunt

 

Mountain plovers aren’t always in the mountains.  In fact, I don’t know if they ever go in the mountains.  In the summer we see them at Pawnee National Grasslands out on the plains.  In the winter, they’re on the South Texas plains.  They’re brown and like to stand around on plowed furrowed fields looking like dirt clods.

 

There is a spot they congregate about fifty miles from our house, north of Harlingen and east of Highway 77.  We decided today would be a good day to have a drive-about and see if we could find some.  We invested a few hours in the effort, and scanned farm fields with binoculars and the scope.  We saw a lot of stuff, but never spotted a mountain plover.

 

We did run across a sugar cane harvesting operation though, and stopped to watch.

 

Off in the cane field

 

Heavy equipment lumbers about, just out of sight, mowing down the cane, chopping it up, and depositing it into bins hauled by tractors.

 

The tractors pull their loads out to semi-trucks by the road.  They lift themselves up and dump into the truck until it gets full and heads off to the sugar house for processing, and another truck takes its place.  It’s a steady stream.

There are lights set up so work can continue through the night.

 

The fields, wires, and poles around the harvesting operation were populated by white-tailed hawks.

 

 

We saw about twenty of them altogether.  There must be lots of little critters stirred up by the harvesting that the hawks like to feast on.  Either that, or they just get off on the exhaust fumes….

 

Saw a ringed kingfisher on a wire next to the road.

That’s our largest kingfisher.

 

Spotted some far-off snow geese and zoomed in on them.

 

We could see them just well enough to pick out some smaller Ross’s geese.  #415.

 

So we missed on the mountain plovers.  No problem; we’ve already got them for the year.  We’ll need them again as soon as the year rolls over to 2017 though!

 

It has been cold here the last couple days.  It was good for us all to get out of the house together, Henry included.  Tomorrow it is supposed to be back in the eighties.  Happy Sunday.  Football.  Go Broncos!