Nalle Bunny Run 2019-01-26

I was fortunate to spend a beautiful morning on Hill Country Conservancy's Nalle Bunny Run wildlife preserve this morning. Temperatures were in the low to mid fifties with a very light noth wind blowing. When I started out a single dark cloud was directly overhead but the sun was shining below it, and a short distance down the driveway I was able to get maybe my best photo of a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker ever:

In years past, Eastern Bluebird was a hard bird to find on the Bunny Run. But I've been seeing them more often here for the past year, and this morning I was excited to see this pair inspecting one of the many nest boxes on the preserve (between the white house and the lake):

Maybe they're here to stay!

I found the best bird of the day below the huge cottonwood trees on the east fence line. The dense vines and brush looked like a good place to do some "pishing" and when I did, I immediately heard a Spotted Towhee call in response. But the next bird I saw was a female Eastern Towhee. These two species used to be considered one species, the Rufous-sided Towhee. But years ago they were split into the western Spotted Towhee and the, well, eastern Eastern Towhee. Spotted Towhee is an expected winter resident in central Texas, but Eastern Towhee is rare here. (Although this winter a few have been found around Austin.) I wasn't able to photograph the male Spotted Towhee but I got a few shots of the female Eastern Towhee. Here's one of them:

I cropped the photo wide to show the preferred dense cover both of these species prefer.

It's fun to anthropomorphize about these two birds that seemed to be together. Was this a chance encounter? Is this eastern gal spending the winter with this western guy? Will they split up and head their distant eastern and western breeding grounds come spring?

I had pretty good luck finding mammal tracks this morning. There were a few muddy patches around, and some spots in the sandy prairie area were moist enough for the loose sand to hold tracks a little better. I found many White-tailed Deer tracks, a few Gray Fox, Coyote, and Common Raccoon tracks, and these small five-toed tracks which I'm pretty sure are from a Striped Skunk:

UPDATE: Kim Cabrera (@beartracker) corrected me on the above track identification. (See the attached observation.) They are hind tracks from a squirrel, and since both fox squirrels and rock squirrels could be at this spot, I don't 'think we can know which these tracks are from. Thanks Kim!

Since we found that scat that looks so much like it's from a bobcat last weekend, I was hoping to find more evidence of bobcat today, which I've never seen signs of before here. But alas, none of the tracks I could find were feline. And I didn't find any similar scat.

All in all it was a fun morning. I visited some corners of the preserve I haven't seen in a long time, the weather was great, and I found a rare bird! I found 36 species of birds total, in almost 3 hours covering about 1.7 miles.

Here's my complete eBird list.

Here are a few more photos on Flickr.

And attached are some observations.

Posted on January 26, 2019 11:09 PM by mikaelb