Ummm, somebody has some explaining to do and I think that person is Mother Nature. Every winter since retirement, Linda and I pack up the RV, toss (gently) the boys in and drive all the way down to south Texas. What is the primary factor in that decision, pretty easy…WARMTH. We have lived our whole lives in the Midwest tundra and we’ve lost our interest in the bone jarring windchills and fluffy white stuff. We still get a taste of it when we return, but we can enjoy the relief while we can. Which brings me back to needing an explanation – it was 39 degrees today here in South Padre Island…let me say it louder for the cheap seats THIRTY-NINE. Granted it is 4 degrees currently at home, but I’m not there…I’m HERE. I am definitely not insinuating that our friends from home had anything to do with bringing these temperatures down with them when they came to visit us yesterday…that would just be cruel hehehehe. Anyway, the real concern down here isn’t us, that’s for sure, but our thoughts are on the Sea Turtles that are on the brink of a cold stun. We visited the Sea Turtle Rescue facility today and they were busy preparing for the worst. Best of luck to the 6 Green Sea Turtles we saw off the SPI jetty 2 days ago (link here).
I was looking through the photo queue to decide what to feature today when I came across this series of shots from last year’s trip down here.
Long time readers of the blog might recognize that log as I featured it many times in the past. It happens to be one of my favorite photography setting. Each visit I look forward to seeing what birds I’ll find perched there.
I have an update on this cherished spot after the jump.
The old adage is time flies for a busy person – and I’ll simply refine that a bit and state that it’s even faster when you are doing something you enjoy. Brad and I always joke that we are busier now than we were before we were retired…noting that the real difference is we aren’t tearing our hair out trying to find those evil spirits in the machine. That isn’t to say it is all stress free down here in south Texas. Some of the local birds prefer not to be seen, much less stare down the end of a large black barrel that goes clicky clicky (at least for us that haven’t made the leap to mirrorless). I am happy to report that after my rather slow start, things have really picked up as we make our way eastward from Big Bend National Park. The count sits at 200+2 which is better at this point than our previous “Average Year” attempts (link here). Ron was even able to make it down here last weekend to get his numbers jump started – he had to go back to zero degree (F) temperatures and that white fluffy stuff, ugh. We are currently at our 4th base camp which is on South Padre Island with the Mangrove Yellow Warbler on the menu. On two unsuccessful attempts so far, but plenty of days left to remedy that. Time to get to the real reason you are here, today’s featured feathered friend.
Based on the shot above, you might think that this is one of those birds mentioned earlier that prefers not to be seen – hit the jump and we’ll see if that is accurate.
Sorry for the lag in posts, the first of the year bird count reset means we are in a target rich environment, especially down here in south Texas. Sun up to sun down we are chasing birds and then by the time I get the spoils offloaded to the storage drives (and the secondary storage drives), make the eBird submissions, update Intrigued’s Average Year bird tracker and write up the day’s trip report I am absolutely exhausted. My brother Ron was also able to join us for a few days so I’m trying my best to get him caught up – yes, our brotherly “competition” transitions to “collaboration” when we are in the field together. My slow start is picking up steam as I’m now on firm ground in the Texas top 100 birders list and steadily climbing. Even bagged a premier rarity for the Rio Grande Valley today – a nice gift for my birthday (today). More to come on that success, but for now, if you are interested you can get up to speed on where we’ve been on our Average Year status page (note, I have not been able to get the charts updated yet) – link here. Best of all, I’ve been meeting a number of wonderful and extremely helpful birders this trip – our feather community never ceases to amaze me.
While I recover from my birthday celebration, going to put you in Brad’s capable hands to bring you another very special bird from their trip “Down Under”. Take care everybody, I’ll be back once things start settling down here.
Take it away Brad…
The title of this story should get your braincells remembering a song from childhood. That is, if you are over a certain age. I’m not admitting to anything at all, mind you.
Jan and I were on assignment down under. We had just completed a long day visiting Taronga Zoo in Sydney and traversing everything there is to see at Sydney Harbour. We spent a little while trying to find P. Sherman at 42 Wallaby Way (from Finding Nemo by Disney), but then decided it was probably time to find our hotel.
Sydney is a lovely city to visit. There’s a bit of nearly everything for any visitor. Sydney has tall buildings for the architecture lover. There are great restaurants liberally sprinkled through the downtown area. A few blocks away from the harbour is fantastic shopping, even some very high-end stores with queues forming outside an hour before the stores opened. Not to mention the Sydney Opera House (a life goal) and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, both right on the water. In my humble opinion, Intrigued readers really must visit Sydney. No, I’m not being compensated by their tourism council. And yes, I’m using Australian spellings where they differ with their American cousins for this story.
On the way back from the harbour area, Jan and I decided to walk through the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney. It was on the way to our hotel after all, and a great chance to look for birds. Within seconds of setting foot in the botanical garden, our first photo subject was prepped and ready to go for us. I was looking to the right side of the path at a Noisy Miner and Jan was looking to the left. She lifted her arm to point at a bird in the tree and asked, “What’s that?” Before I could turn to focus my attention, she had raised her camera and was firing away.
Not going to see one of these hanging out in one of our local trees, that’s for sure. Hit the jump to learn more about this kooky looking bird!
Hope everyone’s year is going smoothly so far. As for me, I am having my worst start to birding since we started the Average Year competition some 4 years ago (link here). The count sits at 86+2 provisionals which is not that impressive when you think of south Texas, but truth is, I have been able to pick up some key checks that would normally be reserved for our Arizona trip. Especially important for this year as we are replacing that annual spring trip with a run up to the Northwest for this year’s CPE Agility Nationals competition. As a bit of compensation, we went further west into Texas this year (Big Bend National Park). Now we are heading back to our more traditional Rio Grande Valley stomping grounds. While on my first run of the year today, I was thinking about what to feature for my first post of 2026…what do I follow a Koala Bear with…hmmm.. clearly nothing..were talking about a Koala folksha! I can’t get to that level of cuteness, but we can go with another first for Intrigue.
Yes, there are Sparrows out there we haven’t covered yet – hit the jump to learn more about this oddly colored member of the Passerellidae family .
Welcome to the New Year everyone! I am getting a late start mostly due to lack of consistent connectivity…that and the fact the birding counter reset to 0 a few days ago. If you are a birder, you know that the beginning of the year is the BEST time to bird as practically every thing you see with wings is a check! As for the connectivity, we are currently in Big Bend National Park and this place is HUGE. For a reference point, the road from one end of the park to the other is ~43 miles. The park itself is over 800,000 acres of which a large number of those produce a slashed circle on your cell phone bar. I’ll get more into this park in future posts, but right now (while I have a few bars of signal) I want to get you to something I kind of let out of the bag in our Christmas greeting. Brad and Jan had the opportunity to explore “Down Under” late last year and I wanted to start off 2026 with one of their observations.
You are in for a real treat, take it away Brad!…
Sometimes, photo assignments turn out to be vacations in disguise. Shhh, don’t tell Intrigued HQ; Jan and I sold this trip on being a four-week long photo adventure, promising to bring back thousands of photos. Well, we actually did bring back tens of thousands of photos. We also had a very nice vacation along the way in a spectacular part of the world. This trip/vacation/assignment ticked several life goal boxes: crossing the equator, crossing the International Date Line, crossing the Pacific Ocean, visiting a new continent, seeing the Indian Ocean, and seeing unique wildlife. You get the idea.
To maximize our coverage area and create the most photo opportunities, on our first full day down under we signed up for a guided tour leaving Melbourne early in the morning. After picking up the other tour participants, the guide and driver named Brian (at least it will be for this story), gave us an overview of the agenda for the day. Once everyone was onboard, and he thought most of the tour group was awake (the tour started before sunrise), he asked if there were any goals we had for the trip. Waiting a few seconds to see if anyone else suggested a goal, I blurted out mine for the day. No one else was really awake it seemed because there we no other suggestions. I realized later that of the nine people in the tour minibus, there were only four English speaking participants. Brian mentioned something about my goal being very nice, but that it had a very low likelihood of being achieved for reasons listed later.
Several hours into the tour, Brian had begun to warm up to the group and suggested we might be able to meet my stated goal after all. As we approached a small bridge over a stream in the middle of nowhere, literally, he slowed dramatically. Dozens of tourists had parked haphazardly on the road and were staring up into the trees. Brian said that when there are a bunch of people pointing up in a tree in the middle of nowhere it’s usually a sign of something high up in the trees. Impeccable logic.
He didn’t want to add to the dangerous parking situation so he continued driving across the small bridge to park at the first safe available place. The road was elevated above the surrounding fields by several feet allowing the creek/river to flow under the bridge with ease. As Brian opened the sliding door on our touring minibus, Jan hopped off first and spotted a brown lump in the tree in front of us at eye level.
How cute is that! – Hit the jump to read more about this adorable creature.
I sit here alone at the Intrigued HQ. The staff is home enjoying the holidays with their families, there is a warm glow from the single light above my desk, a completed stack of performance reviews sit in the outbox, a nice cup of peppermint white hot chocolate steams by my open laptop and the pad of paper with the end of year to-do list only has one item left unchecked – a final post for the year. Looking back, this has been quite a year. So many bright spots along with some struggles I would just soon forget. On the positive side, I am once again very proud of our posting efforts this year. A quick count shows 77 total posts for 2025 (including this one) with Brad bringing you 23 of those from his (and Jan’s) work in the field. Each of those take a significant amount of time from the captures in the field, image processing, storyline, editor review, legal review and the general administration to get them out to you – a heartfelt thank you to everyone that gets this Intrigued gear to rotate.
Then there are the tougher aspects of this year. Although the ankle break technically happened in 2024, the surgery and recovery (ongoing) took up a bulk of this year. Duration wise, this is the worst injury I’ve had to deal with in my lifetime – which is saying a lot as I have had my share of mishaps. As an update to this saga, my surgeon gave me the green light to start running on flat surfaces. He tapped the brakes on the trail running and wants me to hold off 6 weeks before that level of stress. Bittersweet on that as I already had my trail shoes sitting by the door for when I came home. Swapped those out for the pavement shoes and now have a few sloooow runs under my belt. Pain..some…endurance base..atrophied…a huge smile on my face – DEFINITELY. Still a long way to go, but it is a hard to put into words the feeling of freedom that was felt.
And that feeling of freedom is exactly what led me to pick this particular series for the last post of the year.
Hit the jump to learn more about these tropical sounding residents of south Texas.
By now everyone should be nestled all snug in your beds while visions of sugar-plums dance in your heads. We have come to that point in the waning year when we take the time to wish all our gracious friends/subscribers/readers a very merry Christmas.
It is a joyous time of the year and we wish to extend our gratitude and heartfelt thanks for giving us the most precious of resources – your time. We here in the Intrigued family hope your hearts are encouraged, your stockings are full and your holidays gathered with those special people in your lives.
Good news everybody…and much to my surprise… we had a fairly non-eventful staff party for a change, well at least by Intrigued standards. No police, no ambulances, no fire trucks and the always present neighborhood complaints in the inbox were minimal – clearly we are starting to show our age around here. I am sure Brad’s idea to warn our legal department that they were on double secret probation for previous year’s stunts was a tremendous help in keeping things somewhat under control. Note, the clever individual who managed to pick the lock on our copier room will be found, forced to write bad checks and required to disinfect the copier glass.
Needless to say, things are quickly coming to close around here. There are only a few in the office these days mainly working on year end expense reports and finishing up their proposals for next year’s field assignments. I should be working on performance reviews, but I find that is NOT advantageous to the staff this soon after the party sooooo……let’s feature another find at the Port Aransas Jetty.
“Let go…and see where the current, ” I mean jump “takes you“.
We are winding down here at Intrigued as the last of the 2025 events are slowly coming to a close. Yesterday I finished up the last of the crown work which ended up being far more painful than expected thanks to the temporary cap somehow welding to my tooth – have I mentioned before how much I absolutely abhor dental work – just point to a dental drill bit and I’ll give up my mother in an interrogation. Fingers crossed later today I get released by the ankle surgeon, so I can fully enjoy tonight’s Intrigued staff gathering – trust me, you want to be fully healthy before attending one of those parties – the weak are culled ha. That just leaves Linda’s family Christmas gathering and then ours before the trek to warmer weather. Hopefully we will be able to make a few more posts before we stop the presses and turn the lights out on this injury riddled year.
Before I get into the real reason you are here, thought I would pat ourselves on the back and note that last post from Brad marked our 1,000th post here on our wildlife sister site (the Intrigued mothership is currently at 1,533 – even a few of those were lost as we transitioned to the WP service from our own servers). A big thanks to all the staff that got us to this point!
Okay, since we are winding “down”, decided it would be appropriate to go with another “down” of sorts…this one being down the hatch.
I think you already know where this is going, but hit the jump to confirm!
Greetings from the tundra – well, the Illinois tundra that is. We got a good 7 inches of snow yesterday on top of around 4 inches earlier in the week. My driveway looks like a classic West Point defensive position now being outlined by a 3 foot hardened ridge. The worst however is the temps came screaming down, bottoming out around -7F early this morning – windchills in the -24F range. If there was any hesitation to head south, that has been completely discarded. First a few more events to take care of. We had my families Christmas gathering just before this latest storm hit, Intrigued has their party coming up (lord help us ha), we have Linda’s family’s Christmas, then our Christmas and some final appointments to get out of the way first – one being hopefully the final release from my ankle surgeon (Bri needs to run). While I tend to all the logistics involved with those gatherings, I am going to have Brad take the helm and bring you another one of his adventures out east. Take care everyone, stay warm and may your hearts be merry this Christmas season.
Take it away Brad…
Being almost, but not quite, new to birding, I tend to trust the names of the birds to be descriptive. The more Jan and I go out capturing our feathered friends on “film”, the more I learn the names may or may not describe the bird at all. Or the characteristic described can only be seen when the bird has met its demise and is splayed out on a display board somewhere.
One of our first encounters with wading birds was in South Carolina a few years ago, we took photos of everything. It was the first time I came within 19 photos of filling up a very large memory card (at least that’s what the counter on my camera told me) successfully squeezing over 3,700 images onto the card that day. Downloading the photos later took quite a bit of time, as did recharging the camera batteries. Jan and I were shooting from about 8 am until 4:30pm. We weren’t shooting nonstop, but we did take nearly 7,500 photos from a single day’s outing spread across three cards. This was way before Jan got her 200-500mm lens and was stuck using my 70-200mm with a 1.4x TC attached. I was still using a monopod, which helped hold up the 200-500mm on my gripped D300; it does get heavy after a while.
Sorting and categorizing the photos once we were home was a marathon event. I ended up doing the sorting twice because I was only casually identifying the birds that looked different from the ones in the next set of images. That’s when I learned that many of the juvenile versions look completely different from the adults. Their names also do NOT help in the slightest in identifying juveniles. Rookie mistake on my part.
This year, Jan and I finally saw an adult version of today’s bird that does indeed look like its name.
The day started out rather chilly in spite of being in what I would call the Nearly Deep South in February. We had begun to traverse Laurel Hill Wildlife Drive at Savannah National Wildlife Refuge on the state line between South Carolina and Georgia. Technically, we were standing in South Carolina by a couple hundred yards. A winter wind was blowing that day, so we didn’t start out spending much time outside the car. Near a small wind break Jan spotted something moving near the reeds at the edge the marsh.
Hit the jump to see more of this “little boy blue”.
Life Intrigued 