Winter birds of Big Bend National Park
Birds looked like baubles in trees the week before Christmas in Big Bend National Park.
On our first morning in the Chisos Mountain Basin, my wife Kathy and I strolled under a crystalclear blue sky. We breathed in the winter fragrance of ponderosa pines while birds in oak trees chirped like tinkling tree ornaments.
Dark-eyed juncos filled the trees and uttered highpitched “tik” calls or musical “keu, keu, keu” calls. They alighted on the ground to feast on seeds from weeds and grasses.
The lively birds in the sparrow family were once called “gray-headed juncos” with dark gray hoods, gray bodies and reddishorange backs. Houston occasionally gets wintertime juncos, once named “slate-colored juncos.”
Several varieties of juncos spend winters in Texas, and all are classified as dark-eyed juncos, save for the yellow-eyed junco of Arizona and New Mexico.
Flocks of a dozen or more Mexican jays landed in pines and oaks to add glisten to the greenery with plump azure bodies. But their heads lacked the crests of Houston’s blue jays.
The vociferous jays filled the air with gravelly calls, sounding like “weakweak-weak,” as if intoning Canticles. Meanwhile, they were retrieving acorns they had hidden in the ground during late summer for a supply of winter food.
Acorn woodpeckers showed up with their courtly black plumage accented with white around the face plus a bright red crown looking like a Christmas bow. They were pulling out acorns from storage holes they had drilled in Emory oaks serving as granary trees.
How the jays and woodpeckers remembered the location of food caches is a mystery worthy of the holiday season.
Down at cottonwoodlined Rio Grande Village, we walked on a nature trail with a bridge across a marsh born of a river floodplain. And what to our wondering eyes should appear but a marsh wren perched in the cattails. Its holiday caroling consisted of staccato trills like the rattling of reeds in a winter breeze.
The bird is common in coastal marshes near home but surely a treat by the Rio Grande bordering
the desert of Big Bend.
We almost overlooked a greater roadrunner snuggled among the dense brown grasses next to a drainage canal. The bird’s brown plumage made it nearly invisible.
The roadrunner was remaining still while sunbathing. But it slightly
lifted its wings and fluffed up its feathers to soak up rays of warm sunlight on a chilly winter day.