Day One -- May 8th, 2016

In May of 2016 I traveled to Texas with Chris Newton and Gallus Quigley for eight days of non-stop birding.  Our itinerary would take us from Austin to Texas Hill Country, The Davis Mountains, Big Bend, the Lower Rio Grande Valley to the coast before finally wrapping up in Houston.  Along this general path our daily itinerary would be flexible, adjusting based on which target birds we still needed and recent eBird data on what birds were being reported at specific locations.  This flexibility (we generally did not know where we would be spending the night until late in the afternoon of any given day!) resulted in a wildly successful trip.  So much so that I thought it would be worth documenting for anyone else contemplating a similar trip.

As this was my first trip to the Southwest, I was expecting to pick up a good number of life birds along the way.  My life list stood at 470 before the trip so I was fairly certain I would crack 500 on the trip.  In my mind I knew I'd be happy with anything over 50 life birds.  Looking at the list of potential birds, I considered 75 new life birds to be the impossible dream.  In the end I picked up 92 with one and possibly two new life birds picked up as armchair ticks after the fact. (More on those birds later.)

Day one would be a shortened day as my flight did not arrive until 5:30 PM.  Chris and Gallus had arrived ahead of me and picked me up at the airport.  Chris and I were old friends from when he lived in New Hampshire but this was my first time meeting his friend and fellow Florida birder extraordinaire Gallus.  Over the next eight days the three of us had a complete blast and operated as a well-oiled machine.  Gallus had volunteered to do all of the driving and Chris, who was nursing a bad back that would likely require two surgeries to address, had laid claim to the backseat where he could stretch out. ("You cannot go on this trip," his doctor had told him incorrectly.)

With a few hours of day light left, we made our way to Emma Long Metropolitan Park on the outskirts of Austin in search of our first target bird, Golden-cheeked Warbler.  We had received reports of Golden-cheeked Warbler at a specific point on the Turkey Creek Trail and this intelligence proved to be good.  As Golden-cheeked Warbler is an endangered species, these birds are very closely monitored and the trail has excellent interpretative signs explaining the Golden-cheek's endangered status and warning folks against disturbing their breeding activity.  The bird we saw was banded and put on an excellent show for us, flitting about just overhead, calmly feeding for a few minutes before flying off.  As we made our way back to the car along Turkey Creek, fireflies began blinking away in the woods around us and we arrived back at the parking lot to find Common Nighthawks flying over.

Other notable birds at Emma Long Metropolitan Park included Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Western Kingbird, Western (Woodhouse's) Scrub-Jay and Swainson's Thrush.  (Western Scrub-Jay was not a life bird for me at the time but it was my first encounter with the inland race so, when the AOU split Western Scrub-Jay into California Jay and Woodhouse's Jay in July of 2016, I picked up an armchair tick.)

Knowing that we wanted to spend the morning at Kerr Wildlife Management Area in Hunt, we started driving west towards Hill Country.  Using Yelp we began researching well-reviewed hotels in our price range along the route and ultimately choose Frederick as a stopping place which would allow us to maximize sleep while positioning ourselves for an early morning arrival at Kerr.  Our average cost of lodging over the course of the trip was an insane $75/night and, thanks to Yelp, we did not have a bad experience until we arrived in Houston.

Day one life birds included:

Black-crested Titmouse 
Carolina Chickadee
Western Kingbird
Golden-cheeked Warbler

With Woodhouse's Scrub-Jay added after the fact.