Feb 25 - Island Birding & Afternoon Cruise

Sunday February 25 – Island birding outing by bus & Intercoastal Waterway afternoon cruise. 

We started the day at 10 am with the Festival’s Island Birding by Bus outing lead by Rita.  We visited Port Aransas Nature Preserve and Overlook and the north beach.  The highlight of the outing was watching the two Whooping Cranes who have spent the winter in the town at the Nature Preserve.  This is the first time in 15 years that this has happened and everyone is very protective of the two Whooping Cranes hoping that the cranes will return in the fall with a youngster and claim their 300 acres of wetlands necessary for their support.   It was really special to see this pair. 

We zipped home for a quick lunch when the outing was done and went on to Leona Turnbull Birding Center and the Port Aransas Wetlands Park.    We saw the usual suspects that we have seen the last couple of days.  At 2 pm we went on Woody’s sightseeing boat for the intercoastal waterway afternoon tour.  Rick was our guide and he was excellent.  He has lived in Port Aransas since 1974 and knows a lot of history and knows where to look for the birds also.  We saw Red-tailed Hawk, wading birds and Bottle-nosed Dolphin.  The first mate of the boat told us about the history of the old lighthouse and then demonstrated how fisherman run a shrimp net.  Then he took net captures and went one by one explaining the fish, or squid or shellfish we caught and put these in a pool of water for us to look at.  It was really interesting.  The sun was out and it was warm and it was the perfect outing to end the festival for us.  

After this we visited the Preserve Overlook off the highway and Paradise Pond.  The Preserve did not have anything special at that time of day, but at Paradise Pond we had a Black & White Warbler and he was in breeding plumage and gorgeous.  He showed up briefly and was chased away by a Yellow-rumped Warbler.  We only had a couple of looks at him and he was gone.  We met people in all the outings and they were from all over.  All of them were interesting people. 

The one thing the festival did not have was group dinner which would have been nice.    Most festivals have that evening along with a feature speaker.  This festival had featured speakers whom I would have loved to have attended the session but each time, it was in the middle of the morning or afternoon and we were booked already.  There were no evening talks which is the norm.

We are just chilling out right now as we leave here tomorrow and travel to San Antonio tomorrow morning and will do some birding there also.   Today was another good day for us.