Judy Spots Truly Rare Birds in Subtropical Texas

By Greg Fieg

The year 2010 marked a milestone for Judy Kestner, your intrepid editor, as she spotted two highly unusual birds to add to her birder's life list:  the Northern Wheatear and the Amazon Kingfisher.

Both were spotted within a two-hour drive of her home in Corpus Christi, Texas, which is situated in a lush, subtropical Gulf Coast savannah where hundreds of bird species spend the winter, from the huge, endangered Whooping Crane to tiny, flitting hummingbirds, which though rare in the coldest months do over-winter often. It's sort of an ornithological heaven.

Judy has counted 387 species since she began logging them about 10 years ago, but rarely has had an experience like 2010, when she spotted the wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe) thousands of miles out of its habitat and migratory path. Normally the bird, a type of thrush, can be found on the fringes of the Arctic Circle in Greenland and Alaska during its summer breeding season and at the edges of the Sahara Desert in West Africa in winter when its nesting territory is uninhabitably icebound, with temperatures as low as 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and sometimes colder. Among birds of the world, its seasonal flight paths are some of the longest, traversing desert, ocean tundra and ice.

"They think maybe it got blown off course during migration," Judy said, noting that the gray and white insect eater, named because of a wheat-colored ear patch, was located on an Amish farm outside Beeville, TX where bugs are plentiful because insecticides are not used. Birders from all over the United States flocked to the Borntrager farm to ogle the bird and purchase delectable homemade pecan and peanut brittle. Coincidentally, another (or the same???) wheatear had been spotted on an Amish farm in Ohio earlier that year.

The Amazon Kingfisher (Chloroceryle amazona), spotted along Zacate Creek in the Rio Grande community of Laredo on the Mexican border, was nearly 1,000 miles north of its usual territory which stretches from the southern extreme of Mexico south as far as the hot and semi-arid Gran Chaco region of northern Argentina.

The Amazon Kingfisher is a shimmering emerald green with white belly and collar and looks much like its South Texas cousin, the Green Kingfisher, but is some three times larger, measuring more than 12 inches long from the tip of its bill to its tail.

Both rare birds were American Birding Association regional sighting records:  the second wheatear record in Texas and the first for the kingfisher in continental North America.

Judy has been fascinated by birds most of her cognitive life, following the lead of her mother, Jean Davie Fieg, who recorded that one of Judy's first words at age 14 months was "robin" (pronounced "ah-boon") .

Judy is a member of the Texas Ornithological Society, recording secretary for the Audubon Outdoor Club of Corpus Christi and a founding member of the Monte Mucho Audubon Club of Laredo. Occasionally she leads field trips for both clubs and was a field trip leader for the TOS at their annual spring meeting in Rockport, TX in 2010.

Judy also participates in two to three annual Christmas Bird Counts near her home, counting as many live birds (seen or heard) in one day as she can identify. The National Audubon Society established CBCs early in the twentieth century in the early days of conservation in response to a tradition called the Christmas "Side Hunt" when hunters sought to shoot as many birds as possible.