Semi-Tuft
Forget your Dallas cowboys and your Houston Astros. Texas’ real champions count birds once a year at freeport. They’re not bird watchers, they’re birders. And therein lies a tail.
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Noel feared Cocoa Beach and San Diego would surely beat us, so we hurried back into the field. We scaled a gate and walked down a road to a pond where we got what was my favorite bird of the day. Jane told me a pond like the one we were approaching was a good place to find a Vermilion Flycatcher. If one were there, it would likely be sitting on a bare limb hanging out over the water. Sure, Jane. When we got to the pond, Noel was ecstatic at what he saw. He pointed, and we all raised our glasses and simultaneously spotted. On a bare limb overhanging the water sat a small, beautiful bird with a red belly and crown and a black back and eye-mask. Right. It was your Vermilion Flycatcher, chirping along its “slightly phoebe-like p-p-pit-zee.” (Roger Tory Peterson, A Field Guide to the Birds of Texas, p. 162. This is one of the things that distinguishes the Vermilion from the Olive-sided Flycatcher, whose song is a spirited quick-three-beers. The other thing is that the Olive-sided is gray-green and white instead of red. A lot of people notice that first.) On a day like today, Noel said, this might be the only Vermilion Flycatcher that would be seen. If I ever become a dedicated bird-watcher, I expect that little red bird will have had something to do with it.
In the afternoon, we shifted to the Lake Barbara Town Dump. As Victor Emanuel had pointed out, birding offers one the opportunity to relate to one’s environment in a way that most city-dwellers miss. As I reflected on my surroundings I felt smugly sympathetic toward my fellows in the city who had elected to remain in their warm homes and watch the Dallas Cowboys while I had the good fortune to be able, on the eve of Christmas eve, to contemplate the wonders of the effluent society.
We found an Eastern Meadowlark and some gulls and, on a track across the field from the dump, I spotted a Canadian Pacific Refrigerator Car, a lingerer far off its normal migration route. We ran across a mother crayfish (a crawmom?) laying eggs and looking alarmed at our presence. One of the Arlington men who had joined us for the afternoon suggested it might not be so bad to change places with her, trouble-free as she probably was and all. I thought it would take a good many more troubles than I now suffer before I would be willing to spend Christmas in a tire track filled with stagnant water.
Dumps can be full of surprises, and the next one was not pleasant. Jane Robinson, who had walked ahead of me, stopped at the edge of a hole, took one glimpse, looked away quickly and asked me please to confirm what she thought she had seen. The hole looked like a grave and reeked of decaying flesh. With the specter of Dean Alien Corll still hanging heavily over Houston I was, quite frankly, apprehensive. When I looked in and saw a heap of bodies wrapped in plastic, I feared for a moment we had found something we desperately did not want to find. Blessedly, the plastic was torn in spots and we could see the bodies were those of dogs and not teenage boys. Dogs die and town dumps are probably a good place to bury them. I hope you don’t find any when you aren’t expecting them.
Our primary reason for having come to the dump was to find the elusive Le Conte’s Sparrow, a tiny bird known to live in the field of tall grass next to the dump. We searched and beat the grass, but could scare up nothing. Then, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, while the others looked in the wrong direction, a sparrow whisked by not four feet from me and disappeared into a clump of bush about twenty yards away. I called to the others and, eager with anticipation and obviously ready to welcome me into the ranks of the keen observers, they asked me to describe the bird. “Well, it was little ... and brown ... and had a beak.” They had counted on something more diagnostic. My aura had dimmed. Sic transit gloria. To regain my lost prestige, I volunteered to flush the bird out and charged into the grass. I don’t know what kind of grass it was, but it was vicious. After no more than eight steps I felt I had been bitten by a snake with a three-foot mouth and thousands of teeth. Heedless of pain, I charged on, circled the bush, flushed the bird and learned, to my delight, that it was indeed the Le Conte’s. I had recovered. More to the point, I had been hooked. I was at least a white-belt birder.
Soon we spotted other sparrows fooling around on a collection of gravel and shell heaps. We were able to get within twenty feet of them and to get an excellent view through the glasses. Inexplicably, one of the Arlington men seemed to feel the need to get even closer and kept scaring them off by charging loudly onto the piles. I checked to see if this was good form and had my suspicions confirmed. I was righteously indignant at such amateurish behavior. We birders can be haughty.
At 6 p.m. we met Dan Hardy and his group and compared lists. Our worst fears appeared to have been confirmed.
“Did you get the Towhee?”
“No.”
“Ohhhhhhh. How about you? Did you find a swallow?”
“No. You neither? Oh, man!”
“Noel, it’s the worst list yet!”
“We did get two White-tailed Kites and the Rusty Blackbird.”
“How about the Palm Warbler?”
“No, and we saw three of them yesterday, but we couldn’t find them today. We didn’t get the Pine Warbler, either.”
“No Pine Warbler! That’s terrible.”
It was already dark, but we decided to take one more run at the Screech Owl and Woodcock. Last year, they had found the Woodcock in a patch of thick, tall reeds that virtually defy human passage. We had fought our way through the reeds earlier in the day, but with no luck. Perhaps one more look would turn up a Woodcock. It did not. Dan noted that part of the Woodcock area had been torn down and two houses constructed on the site since last year. “Why did they do that? Why? We’ve got to have a Woodcock.” As we trudged back to the cars, Noel was still blowing his Screech Owl call in the woods. I had been practicing a bit and, in a moment of whimsy, answered him with what was really a pretty good imitation. I think I came within an ace of getting my name listed as a Bleary-eyed Bald Ego, perhaps being mated by a Screech Owl.
Tired, downcast, sensing defeat, we drove to Jack’s Restaurant in Angleton, where the official tally would take place. It is amazing what a major sporting event can do for the local economy. From a standard 24-hour restaurant catering to local folk, Jack’s had been transformed into the nerve and nervous center of an epic contest. Approximately 80 weary birders jammed the place, a bit pessimistic about the count, but happy to see people they had not seen since last Christmas. Jane Robinson even saw some people she had not seen since the day she got Ross’s Goose at the Anahuac Refuge.
Not many folk in the Brazosport area seem directly interested in joining the Christmas Count themselves, but its success has brought enough local and national publicity that they have come to regard it with some pride.
Landowners welcome birders onto their property. During the day Victor Emanuel had been given a nickel discount on a glass of milk because of the business he brought into the area. A clerk in a drive-in grocery noticed his binoculars and asked, “Are we going to win this year?” Now, at Jack’s, a public relations man from Dow Chemical was presenting Emanuel with a plastic ball that had two gulls and a sand dollar embedded within it over a little plaque that read “Brazosport Christmas Bird Count.” (Folk in the area want Emanuel to name the count after the whole Brazosport area and not just after Freeport, but Victor says there is little chance of that, now that Freeport has gained national recognition among birders.)
After we went through the buffet line, we moved into a dining room that lay beyond the beige accordion divider. On the wall behind the head table was a hand-painted scene obviously intended to be Highwayah. An insect-repellent stick and/or deodorizer hung from the ceiling. As I sat at the end of one of two long rows of tables, my mind filled with visions of the Tail Twister of the Lion’s Club threatening to cut off a Brother Lion’s necktie if he didn’t make a larger contribution to the eyeglasses fund, and of the somewhat more dignified Rotarians singing God Bless America and talking about the Four-Way Test.
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