We left Dunnellon, FL heading to Key West, FL where we would board the Yankee Freedom to the Fort Zachary Taylor in the Dry Tortugas. As background, many of you may not know that the young Chuck’s dream was to become a Marine Biologist. His motion sickness sank that dream. Any serious “Birding Big Year” requires pelagic boat trips, tough for someone who gets seasick, and the Dry Tortugas was to be our first of…
To begin our own migration east, just outside the gates of the Texas “World Birding Center” site of Bentsen-Rio Grande State Park, we were able to see and hear both the Lesser and Common Night Hawks in our campground. Inside the park the next morning we identified a Zone-tailed Hawk and saw our first Mississippi Kites of the year, an amazing “kettle” of 30+ of them, circling and riding the thermals. We had been intermittently…
The next leg of our adventure began at Fort Davis National Historic Site. We hoped that their bird feeding stations would yield a new bird for our list, but far more importantly, that the nearby HAT STORE still had the one Chuck regretted not purchasing on our last visit to the area. He got the hat, but not a new bird at the feeding station, so we set out in search of a Black-chinned Sparrow…