I was recently at the Rio Grande Valley Bird Festival in Harlingen, TX. If you can't tell by how often I talk about South Texas, it's one of my favorite places to visit not only for the birds, but also for the great friends I've made at the festival. Next year is the 20th Anniversary of the festival, it should be a wild time and if you have never been, you should have it on your bucket list.

I have an odd checklist when I visit, I've seen almost everything I can possible see there but getting the key valley species as soon as I arrive is always fun (like the above great kiskadee). This time I went with a new friend that I made at the Biggest Week In Birding Festival in Ohio last May. She had never been to the valley so showing someone all those great Texas specialties for the first time is as fun for me as seeing them the first time.

I could spend several days at Estero Llano Grande (and have) and this photo though not the best on the planet is a great cross section of the amazeballs birding that can happen. In one scope view I have green kingfisher, American bittern and great kiskadee. I ask you, where else would you get such a great birding trifecta in the same field of view? South Texas, it's hard to beat.

I swear there is a bird in the above photo.

Estero is where the nightjar known as the common pauraque is relatively easy to find. I've posted about their camouflage before. And though we were able to find them easily in that same spot, we were pointed out more parauques by field trip leaders that were hunkered down in yards of people who live next to Estero. There's one in the above photo...can you find it (even Non Birding Bill was able to find to find it in the photo).

Yep. I swear there's a bird in the above photo too. That's the pauraque in the "usual spot" at Estero. There are actually about two or three in this spot (but only one in the above photo). I know brown birds aren't for everybody. I know that I can seem unreasonable in my love of things like native sparrows and pipits but you have to give it to pauraques as a brown bird. They at least stay in one spot for several hours to give you a chance to find them.

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.