Nalle Bunny Run 2019-04-20

Four people joined me this morning for the monthly group walk on Hill Country Conservancy's Nalle Bunny Run wildlife preserve. We spent nearly 3 hours finding 35 species of birds and enjoying beautiful weather and lots of blooming wildflowers. This preserve was loaded with this tiny pink flower which the iNaturalist Seek app identified as Slender Hedeoma. I'm curious to see if the iNat community agrees with this!

One aspect of springtime birding in central Texas is that not all of our winter resident species have left yet, and some of them have started to sing after having been silent all winter. We got to experience this today when we heard and finally saw this Orange-crowned Warbler singing while it foraged on the east fence line of the preserve:

Down the hill from the Orange-crowned Warbler near the lake we got great looks at a newly returned summer resident warbler, the Yellow-throated Warbler. I first heard it singing in the cypress trees on the other side of the fence line so I tried playing a recording of its song. After a few minutes it flew right up to us, counter-singing to what it thought was a competing male:

When we were back up at the gate, before we left we enjoyed watching pollinators in a stunning patch of Indian Blanket wildflowers. Here's an American Lady butterfly on one of them:

Here's our complete bird list on eBird.

Here are a few more photos on Flickr.

And attached are the same photos as iNaturalist observations.

Posted on April 20, 2019 11:04 PM by mikaelb