Texas City Dike: Drive-by Shooting

“We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.” ~ Lynda Barry

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As our family was still knee-deep in the frenzied pitch before for Spring Break week, Dad and I decided to do a quick trip to a place I’d not been since way before we married, back when I was still dating a young man from this town (his parents lived there). It never occurred to me that anywhere within the industrial complex of Texas City might be a birding hotspot, but apparently it is.

Texas City Dike is not the prettiest of places. It’s a man-made jetty, really, concrete and giant boulders reaching out into a shallow bay. People litter. They are mostly just there fishing, little concern for anything save a drowning an animal in our atmosphere so its death can become a tasty lunch. There’s not even a decent place to get out and hike.

But there’s an upside. It’s a terrific place to tick off shore birds and waterfowl without ever leaving the comfort of your car. Really.

Being a get-out-and-hike’r type, this is not something I like to brag about. After all, getting outside is at least half of the joy of birding. Being our first time to bird there, me sitting idly in the passenger seat or with legs dangling helicopter style from the sliding door (tee hee), he casually rolling and stopping constantly, no one ever behind us, heavy camera resting in the lap…there was something oddly chic about the experience. I can’t explain it.

Perhaps this is how rich people in their limos feel…except without the beverage service. I call it drive-by shooting — birding style.

I’m not sure what took us so long to get here since we began birding in earnest more than four years ago, but one thing is for sure. We will be going back.

Captain John
My Oldest Son Liked This Shot

Typically, we are not only shooting (with a camera) and field-lens scanning for bird species, but we are also logging and counting numbers of them for science. This time we ditched eBird altogether (I’m sorry!!) as it was just another thing manage in a huge bag of things. I needed a break, so our only goals for the day were to get out of the house and see some different birds.

Next time, we’ll be better, eBird. We promise.

In the course of just an hour, we added a few more for 2017 in addition to the several others we saw that were already on the list:

• Eared Grebe
• American Oystercatcher
• Common Goldeneye
• American Golden-plover (early!)
• Brewer’s Blackbird
• Sanderling
• Short-billed Dowitcher
• Red-breasted Merganser
• Bonaparte’s Gull
• Franklin’s Gull
• Least Tern (early!)
  
• Royal Tern
• Long-billed Dowitcher
• Ruddy Turnstone

No new ‘Lifers’ on this day, March 3, 2017, but this trip got us to a whopping 132 species for our annual count. It would be a great start for our next birding outings out west the next weekend.

As for the photographs below, they were all shot from the ‘minivan bird blind.’

I think I may have even gained 5 pounds doing nothing at all.

Common Loon

Black-bellied plover

Eared Grebe

Brewer’s Blackbird
(Foot Tucked)

American Oystercatcher
‘Clown Bird’ My Kids Call Him

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Colorado posts still in the works!