Bird A Day: Pauraque or When the Bullseye is Gone

January 2, 2020

#BirdADay is my attempt to get back into my archives and finally write about birds that have been collecting dust in my archives. I’m resetting my life right now and birding always bring me there and I’m going to try and post a bird either here or on my social medias every day in 2020.

If you’ve ever met me, you know that the Rio Grande Valley is my favorite place to escape to go birding. I’m hard pressed to ever get a lifer there, but I figure the day I get tired of seeing a green jay is the day I’m done with birding.

Estero Llano Grande is my favorite park in Texas.

Whenever I go to Texas, my first stop is generally Estero Llano Grande State Park (if not a stop for gas station tacos at a Stripes gas station—trust me, they’re great). This park is a balm to me in so many ways—whistling-ducks, buff-bellied hummingbirds, green jays, kiskadees—and those are the low hanging fruit. Green kingfishers, rose-throated becards and clay-colored thrushes are possibilities.

Common Pauraques are in the goatsucker/nightjar family. They can hide in plain sight during the day and fly around at night catching insects.

One of the “bullseye” birds is the pauraque. It is known that if you go down the Alligator Lake Trail (here’s a post I did from 2010 about this exact spot) and look for sticks piled to the left that is where a few can be roosting. I strolled in the warm Texas sun on a November day to the pauraque site taking in the soundscape of Texas birds around me. I got to the spot and began the search for the pauraque Because of their cryptic plumage, it can take a few minutes to get your eye on one. t’s almost like a magic eye painting. I did not find a pauraque. But I found paurque pieces.

Common pauraque feathers where one would normally find a pauraque.

Others soon came along. Some were already aware that the reliable pauraque spot had had a fatality. To add to the blow, this was right before the Rio Grande Valley Bird Festival—this would be target bird for anyone new to the Valley. The upside is that there is more than one pauraque in the Valley and others were found at the festival. But this one was special. It was almost as much of a guarantee as the winter of 2004/2005 when I could guarantee people great gray owls in Minnesota. I loved taking people new to the Valley to this spot and letting them find their first pauraque.

This spot usually had more than one pauraque. Once Clay and I were there and thought we had a super fat pauraque but it was a female roosting with two chicks. I wandered the area hoping to find one of the others and couldn’t find one. So I decided to study the feathers.

The feathers looked to be plucked out and didn’t have shredded shafts. If the feathers shafts are shredded or the feathers are clumped with dried saliva, that’s a sign of a mammalian predator. Birds of prey tend to pluck. However, it does look like some teeth marks can be made out at the tops of the feathers.

It was a temptation to take these feathers home (yes, I have a permit). But I could find no way to make them part of my educational tools up in Minnesota.

There was something magical about being able to have such cool cryptic birds be an “x” marks the spot type of bird, but the lack of guarantee is part of what makes birding so rewarding and fun (at least when you get the birds). Perhaps pauraques will come back to this spot? Perhaps they’re already there. I hope to sneak down to the Valley again over the winter and maybe I’ll have a #BirdADay post that they are there.

Like I said earlier, other pauraques were found. Here’s one that was at Estero during the trip, very close to the parking lot and right next to a park sign.

The Nighthawk Connection

June 1, 2011

I love days that do not turn out the way I thought they would. Especially when the original plan included copious amounts of laundry. It started when the woman who does my hair (Rachel) texted and asked if I wanted to go fishing. I did want to inaugurate my pole to the season and I need to stay in some sort of practice for ranger programs so I was excited to say yes. I typed up my beat for for 10,000 Birds (basically, it's a "know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em" article on how to be an actual help to found baby birds) and when that was up and ready to go, I joined Rachel for some fishing. We were fishing off of Lake Harriet which is a frequent bike route for me and it's also where the great horned owls were nesting (young owls have left the nest now). But it's not a bad place for some casual fishing. All was well, we were giggling, chatting and in my case, landing some of the smallest bass ever when a guy started playing his flute. We both sort of rolled our eyes. When I enjoy the lakes, I like to listen to bird songs, not some random guy working on his "sound" with his flute.

All of a sudden, I heard a nighthawk call loud right above us. It sounded off three times and I realized that it was 2pm (not the time for a nocturnal bird to be singing) and I didn't see it fly off. Was the nighthawk as irritated with the flute player as we were?

A quick scan of the tree and we found the common nighthawk. Do you see it? It's right there in that tree! I didn't have my scope with me to digiscope it. I find that if I try to fish and bird at the same time, I don't do either well. After Rachel and I finished our day, I ran some errands and headed home. I noticed that I had an hour before Non Birding Bill would be home so I thought I'd strap my scope to my bike and try to digiscope the nighthawk. Since it's a nocturnal species and their defense during the day is to remain still and camoflage, my chances were good that it would still be there late in the afternoon.

As I pedaled around Lake Harriet, I noticed ducks running amok. Drakes were chasing hens and at one point a hen almost nailed a jogger right in the face. I paid attention as I headed down the trail and then noticed a biker in front of me yelling at some cars on the road that goes around Lake Harriet. I thought the bike rider was yelling at someone driving a car, as I neared I could see a hen mallard in front of the vehicle. It sounded like the bike rider was yelling at the driver, perhaps for hitting the duck. I felt that it wouldn't have been the driver's fault because the ducks were chasing each other. I pulled over and heard snippets of conversation:

Bike Rider: "Nice job."

Woman with Car: "We are trying to help, we are trying to get bird expert, she has nest in the road!"

I recognized the voice. It was a woman I had seen at parties who was a friend of NBB's Theatre Arlo partner. But I couldn't remember her name. I knew she had an accent and that her name sounded Russian...what was the name.

I lifted my sunglasses, her name suddenly hitting me, "Natasha?"

Woman with Car: "OH! You're who I'm looking for! Sharon, we've been trying to call you for the last hour! Help, what do we do with this duck?"

Natasha had been trying to get hold of someone to give me a call because she didn't have my number--how weird that I took this bike ride at the last minute and ran into her! I got to the street and assessed the situation: a hen mallard had a nest right on the curb of a very busy and narrow street around the lake. It looked like the nest had started on a hill right above the curb and the eggs shifted down on the pavement. Some nesting material surrounded the eggs as did a few beer cans. I suspect someone else found the nest in the street and tried to use the beer cans as a buffer from from cars.

Natasha and her friend directed traffic as she told me how she had seen the duck and worried it would get hit. Many of the eggs were cracked. Most felt cool. I peeled open the cracked eggs and found liquid inside. I picked up an uncracked egg and pealed it too and found that egg was also liquid. I made a snap judgement:

This was probably a young female who made a poor choice for a nest. If I took the eggs away now, she wouldn't nest there again, it'd would be as if a fox/raccoon/skunk had raided the nest. She would be out of the street and in less danger from being run over by cars and could possibly nest again this year. The eggs weren't viable and if they stayed, she might still try to incubate them and most likely get hit by a car. I removed the eggs. Then Natasha and I surrounded the female causing her to fly out of the road on to the bike trail. She was spooked by a dog walker and went to the lake where she would be safe. I stuck around a few minutes and she swam to shore, staring at me and making soft quacks.

I'm sorry I took her nest but her eggs were dead and her nest situation was precarious for her survival. At least this way she would live to nest again and this time stay FAR away from a busy street.

I continued on my way around the trail and did find the roosting nighthawk:

It was still here, perched the way a nighthawk should be. Lake Harriet is not far from my apartment at all. We only hear one nighthawk singing, I wonder if this is that bird that flies over our apartment at dusk?

As I took pictures of the bird through my scope, I heard someone passing me say, "Is she looking at leaves? Oh, I bet she's taking pictures of bark."

Well, I was taking pictures of a bird that uses bark to camoflage itself in the middle of the day.

So, all in all not a bad day, despite it not going as I planned it to be, but glad I could be around to offer some help to non birding friends, get in some fishing in and a cool bird too.

For those curious, here's the earlier photo with a red circle around the nighthawk. This is what it looked like without binoculars or a scope.

Do You See That Pauraque?

November 21, 2010

I'm going to start this post off with landscape shots that have a brown bird called a common pauraque in them. See if you can find the bird(s) and at the end of the post, I'll put up the photos pointing out where they are and you can see if you were able to find them.

Let's start with an easy one, there's one common pauraque in this photo.

There's one pauraque in this photo.

This is the hardest one, but there sure is a pauraque in this photo.

There are actually 2 pauraques in this photo, one easy...one almost impossible.

Most of my birding time during the Rio Grande Valley Birding Fest was spent at Estero Llano Grande State Park. Partly because I love it but also because some of my other favorite birding sites in the area were closed due to flooding. I went there several times with both Birdspot and WildBird on the Fly. One of the target birds on the trails is a common pauraque, a nightjar that is similar to nighthawks and whip-poor-wills. I've heard them and I've seen them flushed on roads at night in Central America, but I've never seen a roosting pauraque.

I knew people were seeing between 1 - 3 at a time and I was hopeful we'd find more than one. We sure did, above is one of the pauraques. With that cryptic brown plumage, you can understand how they might be easy to miss. They are active at dawn and dusk and fly around to catch insects with their mouths wide open. Don't let that tiny beak fool you, it belies a mouth worthy of any mother-in-law.

The park rangers and other birders were very helpful to point out the general areas of where the nightjars were being seen, but you still had to some work. Here's the trail near alligator lake where they typically have been found roosting. Note the white sign, it warns people to stay on the trails so the pauraques do not get flushed. Note the pile of brush on the left side of the trail, that's where the pauraques were. I suspect the brush was placed there to encourage people to stay on the trail and not wander in looking for the birds and inadvertently flushing them.

Check it out: Disapproving Pauraque! We found one right away and I was happy for that. These nightjars were a challenge to digiscope. Number one: they were in the shade. I could get around that by using the timer on my camera and minimize camera shake for a long exposure. However, the second and the most challenging problem was that the birds were too darned close to focus in my spotting scope! The sticks that were protecting the pauraque roosting location blocked some angles and I wasn't about to move the sticks, they were there to help the pauraques. But with patience and creative angling, I managed to grab some shots.

As I was setting up the above digiscoped shot, I found a second and then a third, each closer than the last. The third pauraque we found was literally three feet away from the trail. Finding the pauraques reminded me of morel hunting. Once you find one, you instantly see all the other mushrooms surrounding you. It was the same with pauraques, once you found one, the other popped out like an image in a magic eye painting.

Many of the pauraque photos like the above bird were not digiscoped because they are just too close. I always wonder how many owls I pass under on a regular basis, not I wonder how many pauraqes, poor-wills and other nightjars I have almost stepped on in my birding travels. The pauraques did seem to be everywhere in South Texas. Birdspot and I were wandering around Frontera Audubon, watching a brown thrasher that was working some leaves, when all three of us--especially the thrasher jumped with a leaf toss flushed a pauraque. I wonder how often other birds flush nightjars. And I wonder if they are irritated because of the scare?

And now to see how you did with finding the pauraques in the first five photos:

Here's common pauraque number one. This one may have been too easy, that eye sticks out. But I walked past it at least twice before I finally realized it was three feet from the trail.