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.

Broken Toe Birding at Estero Llano Grande Part 1

April 11, 2013

I am both incredibly excited and a little nervous about my current spring travel schedule. It is action and birding packed but wow, it's a lot. Last week I was a guest speaker at Quinta Mazatlan but you can't go to the Rio Grande Valley for just a day. If you're going to head down, you want to take advantage of the tremendous birding opportunities. However, the day before I left for the valley...I was running around my apartment tying up loose work ends, booking future travel, packing, etc when I wasn't paying attention to where I was walking and slammed my little toe into the corner of one of our many bookshelves. Yes...I know what you're thinking. Ow. So here's a text exchange that immediately occured between Non Birding Bill and I (he was out writing at a coffee shop):

I can't believe NBB wasn't willing to watch a couple of YouTube videos demonstrating how to realign my toe. Ha. So we went off to a clinic where my doctor said, "It's not dislocated, it's either bruised, but most likely broken. Either way, you need to stay off it for the next four days and ice it for 20 minutes every two hours for twenty minutes."

But...but...but...I have a 5K at the end of the month and I'm going to Texas for a week tomorrow (insert stern doctor look here). So wildlife drives for me it would be. This time my goal was to try and visit places I haven't visited before in RGV...or at least in a long time. However, I cannot visit this area without at least a day at Estero Llano Grande State Park. Just a stroll down this path to the deck instantly relaxes me--especially as winter holds on long and fast as if it's been taking advice from Ned Stark. So after months of monochrome cold white and gray, I'll gladly squee over green and a mere 80 degrees. Estero is arguably one of the best spots to start your south Texas birding adventure the first time you visit. They have a deck with wifi and a great view of water and I thought maybe I could hang out there and digiscope. My toe wasn't too bad and I could do some walking but I knew that wouldn't be the best way for it heal.

On the deck I ran into Ranger John Yochum who I have met before on my Texas travels. He said his school group had cancelled and if I wanted, he'd give me a personal tour. I mentioned my toe and to my surprise, he insisted on giving me a tram tour! I was Miss Daisy to his Polk and he saved my toe from a lot of hurting. Thanks to him I got to do a butt load of digiscoping, which was great for my Digiscoping Big Half Year Challenge for Sax Zim Bog.

Like I said, this is a great spot to get a lot of common valley species off your list. Many of these birds will be at several parks like the above female golden-fronted woodpeckers but Estero has wetlands too.

John took me to one of the newer feeding stations. Some of the parks are figuring out that people are coming here for photos and though I don't mind taking a photo of a bird at an obvious feeder, most photographers do not, so they set up natural perches were seed, suet and fruit can be tucked away and you can get some natural looking shots.

Here's a shot of a white-tipped dove, a specialty bird in the area. I'm sure the sun is just hitting the pupil just right, but the dove kinda looks a little methed out to me.

The great kiskadee is a specialy bird here and these sassy birds will fly in for peanut butter. I had to be fast to get photos, it was migration and following the northbound songbirds were lots of accipiters and they periodically bombed through the feeding station. But if you waited a few minutes, the birds would return.

The above Inca doves. There were some common ground doves but I alas didn't get a photo.

Here's a white-winged dove (yep, like the Heart song...oops I meant Stevie Nicks, cause Amy just lovingly yelled at me in the comments. Love that woman).

Estero is a well known as a spot to get a great look at common pauraque and John took me to a different spot to find one in the tropical area. Yes, truly, there is a bird on the ground in that photo...though even I am having a dickens of a time seeing it and I was there and too this photo. Fortunately, I digiscoped it.

As John was toting me around, we saw a trio of birders that I recognized as staying at the same bed and breakfast I was lodging in. We pulled over to say hi and I asked if they had seen a pauraque yet. They hadn't. They were very casual birders and I was worried they may miss it so I asked John if they could join us in the tram and continue on with us towards more pauraques. Everybody seemed game so the tram filled up and we headed towards Alligator Lake, the known spot for pauraques.

OK in this photo, I can totally make out one of the pauraques. It's on the ground, towards the top of the photo, in the center. It's amazing how quickly someone who already knows where to find the birds like these can become a de facto guide for other birds. But I really do get a kick out of taking people to see their first pauraque and waiting for them to discern its shape on the ground. It's like one of those magic eye posters!

It took some fancy angling of the scope, but I was able to get it in.

Look at that giant beautiful frown eye! I always assumed these birds were like nighthawks, flying around high in the sky at night after aerial insects, but learned I was quite wrong. Reading up on them at Birds of North America Online, I learned that they are considered a "terrestrial feeder" and flies very little during foraging. "Appears in many locations to take most of its food by 'jumping and flopping' or rarely running on the ground....When foraging on the wing, generally makes low, short, circling sallies to the air from ground or favorite low perch on rock, stump, branch, or fence post for flying insects."

Gets its food by jumping and flopping, eh? Sounds like Thanksgiving at my family's house--HEY-O! Angela, Mom, Terri, if you actually read this, I kid, I kid.

I'm going to try and divide up some of my Estero adventures in more posts. I have too many photos for one post at this spot and I have to get dressed and go work at the park service.

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.