(Original version published in July 2022)
After a month-and-a-half break from birding, I’d had enough. I needed some birds in my life, heat be damned! When the Fourth of July weekend rolled around, I seized my opportunity for an outing to Lake Creek Trail. As usual, I welcomed any and all birds, but I was especially hoping for Western and Couch’s Kingbirds, Mississippi Kites, and a Yellow-billed Cuckoo—birds that had all been consistently reported in the days before our excursion.
Not wanting to shock my body, or my caregiver, with a sudden 6 AM start, I got up at 7:30. I skipped the bathroom to avoid what sometimes becomes a 45-minute waiting game, but landed fully-dressed in my chair, ready for a bowel movement. Isn’t that how it always happens? Never at the right time?
The urge also precluded me from taking a leak, which might have relieved a bit of the pressure. But, between my already limited energy and the temperature quickly rising, I figured we’d just get there and leave early if necessary. Besides, I thought, my body often settles down, or ceases to bother me, once I’m birding.
Still, on our drive north, I found myself queasy, coughing to nix the itch in my throat, needing to pee but having to poo worse (down here, we call that a Texas-turn-around). “Wow, I am rusty,” I told Kira, noting this rocky return to the world of birds. We arrived at a quarter to nine and entered the lush, green woods.
The leaves glistened in the early morning light. A divine breeze carried voices I knew like those of my family: Northern Cardinal, Carolina Wren, Lesser Goldfinch. As I predicted, everything that had been ailing me disappeared in the healing embrace of nature.
Maybe 200 feet from the parking lot, an oak tree towered over the trail. We paused in its shade where a White-eyed Vireo seemed to be singing a circle around us. I’d heard one before but had never set eyes on the creature. I stared into the brush until finally I noticed a little shifting shape, its bill angling skyward on the last phrase of its song. At last, I glimpsed the elusive vireo! We were not as lucky, however, with the camera.
We proceeded to the first bridge, where according to eBird the kingbirds hung out. Instead, we saw lots of acrobatic swallows flitting through the air. “Hey, do you think you can grab a pic of one of those?” I asked Kira. She looked at me as if I’d challenged her to spread her arms and take literal flight (in other words: that’s impossible, dude).
We continued down the trail, which curved along the edge of a field. In a tree ahead, Kira spotted a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, and in the next few trees, I discovered a pair of Western Kingbirds! Though common for our area, they were the first kingbirds I’d seen this season. Catching them up close and vocalizing was an added delight.
A pair of small, grayish raptors with long tails and slender wings teased us as we rolled back toward the van. I guessed they were Mississippi Kites—mainly because I didn’t know what else they could be—but their appearances were too brief and distant to make a confident ID.
Whatever they were, they infused excitement into our walk as every 50 or so feet I hollered like a madman, “Kira, come quick, there’s a Mississippi Kite!” Equally gripping were the fearless hummingbirds who defended their nests from any birds who dared intrude upon their territory.
Sweating It Out at Hornsby Bend
I went birding again later that week with an old friend and caregiver who was covering a few nights. We planned for an evening departure, around 6:30 PM, thinking it would be cooler. But, when the day of our outing arrived, my heart drooped at the forecast: 101 degrees. Even so, I was reluctant to cancel. Nic had just gotten up to speed on driving my van and setting up my scope, and I wanted to go out while everything was fresh in his mind.
I chose Hornsby because it’s a great place to bird by scope, and the wonderful wastewater paradise I described had piqued Nic’s interest. Though we were both undeterred by the heat, I reckoned we could always scamper back to the air-conditioned van if it became unbearable.
Security gave us the usual odd looks, with an extra dose of strange due to the swelter. We set up my scope in the shaded parking lot of the Center for Environmental Research and tested it out on a pair of mockingbirds. We proceeded then along the embankment at the northern edge of Pond 1 East, where I scoped two dozen Purple Martins perched on a powerline.
An egret flew low over the pond and alighted on the shore. Still in the van, I repositioned my chair to aim my scope that direction. Nic opened the side window and twisted his arm behind the driver seat to adjust my scope’s focus knob. Instantly, a male Cattle Egret with an orange crown and breast sharpened into view. It wasn’t a new bird, but the first one I’d seen at Hornsby, which made it exciting all the same.
As we approached the road bisecting Pond 1 East and West, a swirling mass of blackbirds unspooled across the asphalt before us. There were hundreds of European Starlings, Red-winged Blackbirds, and others. When we got out, I tracked some of the blackbirds into the tall grasses along the eastern shore of Pond 1 West.
In the process, I flushed a long-legged shorebird from the bank. Its pink legs dangled over the shimmering pond as it lifted swiftly into the air, keening as its black wings carried it away. I recognized the bird as a Black-necked Stilt. This wasn’t a new bird either, but it was my first clear sighting of the bird this year. I gazed into the mud flats, where at least seven others, several juveniles and a few adults, were foraging.
Nic snapped some photos while I rolled to the northern shore for a different vantage. I ambled into the grass, up to the edge of the wild brush. There were several Killdeer in the distance, but I struggled to identify the other, smaller shorebirds.
Nic came over to say the camera was giving him an error message: no SD card. He removed, then reinserted the battery and the SD card, but the camera still refused to take pictures. I shrugged. “Maybe it’s overheating? Let’s keep it in the AC and see if that helps.”
He agreed, then paused. “Do you want any bug spray?” he asked, looking down at my arms.
“No, I’m fine,” I said, then lowered my eyes to find no less than 25 flies swarming my wheelchair and joystick console. I had no idea! Time for some AC, I decided, retreating to the van. Nic swatted away as many flies as he could, but we still took probably half of them home with us.
Once out of the heat, the camera started functioning again. We drove on to the bird blind, passing the shadeless places where on cooler days I would have gotten out to scan for hawks, flycatchers, and waterfowl. A Green Heron flew beside us as we lumbered down the gravel lane. Save for a singing Painted Bunting, the blind was quiet.
The river trail, with its cavern of shade, lured us away from the ponds. Deeper, we wandered, finding cardinals, chickadees, titmice. A pair of Painted Buntings darted past. A pair of tiny woodpeckers foraged in bare-limbed trees. Just like us, they reveled in the woods where the blistering sun ceased to shine. Gratefully, I turned to the darkening sky. A half-moon held the promise of night, and cooler weather.
On Cuckoos and Staying Cool
These two excursions, though short and sweaty, lifted me from the spiritual slump that had plagued the last month of my life. Feeling a sudden rightness with the world, I resolved not to let so much time elapse between outings again. I would not be put off by the heat, however brutal. I would venture out earlier, stick to the shade. Still, I began to wonder if I ever would glimpse that Yellow-billed Cuckoo.
Our stealthy summer resident eludes even seasoned birders, whose checklists often mark the species as “heard only.” Indeed, the cuckoo’s call is one of the most recognizable, an almost menacing rattle that emanates from deep within the woods, slowing to a crawl before it recedes. Its call so commonly foreshadows storms that the bird is also known as the “rain crow.”
Visually, the Yellow-billed Cuckoo is beyond compare. The medium-sized songbird is brown above and white below, with bold white spots on a long, black tail and a dash of rufous in the wings. A black eye edged in yellow mirrors its black-and-yellow bill. But, the cuckoo’s most alluring quality is perhaps how rarely it’s seen.
As the summer waned, the notion that the bird would remain unseen lingered in my mind. It even infiltrated my dreams. We were in bumper-to-bumper traffic when the woman in front of us got out to pluck the bird from a tree beside the road. “Oh wow, that’s a Yellow-billed Cuckoo,” I exclaimed, noting its field marks. But before I could cherish this lifer, the woman popped the cuckoo in a deep fryer and went to town on her fried cuckoo sandwich.
I awoke with a mix of excitement, and profound sadness. Was this an omen that I’d never meet this wonderfully interesting bird? Were my ears too weak to perceive its sound? Was this a bird one could only find with binoculars set to their eyes? Or did it lurk in the depths of forest I simply couldn’t reach?
My questions were answered when a year later an ominous knocking issued from the woods around Platt Lane. “Is that a cuckoo?” I asked the birders around me, my words tinged with the joyous anticipation that attends every new bird. It was, and the dark gray clouds that had loomed all morning began to spit rain.
I caught my first official view of a Yellow-billed Cuckoo a month later. I was at Richard Moya Park when a friend called out the bird mere seconds before it swept into a pecan tree. It was too quick to admire any of the bird’s characteristics. So, lightly, we stepped around the tree, staring up into the canopy, but the cuckoo was gone. Such fleeting glimpses soon became standard. Until this summer, at least.
The most phenomenal looks I’ve ever enjoyed of a Yellow-billed Cuckoo came from a far less likely location: our pool. Standing in the shallow end, my hips spread wide as a crab’s, I watched the bird sail back-and-forth above our heads. It paused in a hackberry. Its yellow bill gleamed in the morning sun. Then it wrestled with a June bug, its rust-colored wings and white-dotted tail flashing as the beetle buzzed desperately to get away.
Did the beetle live? Did the cuckoo feed? I can't say. The duo vanished before their story found its end. But I discovered something greater than the cuckoo’s quest for food: a cure for the summer doldrums, a place where even on the hottest days my body is cool and weightless. Where there are no flies, no sticky limbs, no camera to be kept in an air-conditioned car. Where I need not brave the triple digits to commune with the finest creatures. And, best of all, it’s right at home.
Enjoy the birds,
Eric