Tony Amos Beach 2017-12-21

This morning starting a little after 8:00, I counted birds on the Tony Amos Beach in Port Aransas. Starting at Access Road 1, I drove the 7.4 miles to Access Road 2 in about 1.5 hours. The weather was extremely foggy, the temperature was about 64 degrees F. Compared with when I last counted birds here on 9/30, numbers were much lower. But looking at some of my past checklists for late December on this beach, today's numbers only seemed a little low.

The biggest surprise was not finding any Piping Plovers or Snowy Plovers, and finding only 4 Ruddy Turnstones. Interestingly, 3 days ago on the Port Aransas Christmas Bird Count I found Sanderlings, Piping Plovers, and Ruddy Turnstones in higher than expected numbers out on the lagoon-side of the island. Maybe these species have a seasonal preference for the mud flats over the beach this time of year.

Most fun this morning was finding 40 Red Knots, a long-distance-migrating shorebird in sharp decline. I hope we can save it. They were clustered in 4 groups. Here are three of them:

True to their name, they actually do turn red in the summer, but they're not red for very long in Texas.

Also fun was finding two Lesser Black-backed Gulls. Here's one of them:

Here's my complete eBird list.

Update 2017-12-24: On Facebook Lynn Amos posted this comment: 'You found Tony's "gap", when the PIPLs disappear from the beach for a bit, but do return before going north to nest.' Very interesting!

Publicado el 21 de diciembre de 2017 a las 10:09 PM por mikaelb