Hold Music vs. Lesser Nighthawk

To the dear readers of this blog (there must be 7 or 8 of you now, you exclusive club, you!) we apologize for the lag in super-awesome posts lately; we're on the road. To hold you over until the next post of witty banter, we invite you to consider this post "hold music" or elevator music, or whatever it is that fancy blogs have these days to keep readers from leaving.

Today's activity: Oiled Wildlife Response Workshop by Wildlife Rehabilitation & Education, aka Sharon Schmalz, my Houston area rehabber!

Afterward we drove down to Sabine Pass and tried to unwind but the migrants kept us on our toes. Highlight: Lesser Nighthawk. Second highlight? Common Nighthawk right after the Lesser!

In fact, here's a video - you can tell how windy it was (and hear the Royal Terns in the background) One more video and two photos are now up in our RBA album.




Yes, you say, there is a clump of bark-colored something in that video. And if you're not a birder, you're probably not going to care one way or another about Common vs. Lesser Nighthawk. Basically Lessers are silent, low-flying, buffy nighthawks who stick to arid southern regions. Commons are the ones you see/hear (they have a "BEERT!" call) over parking lots and around stadium lights at football games over much of the US.

Map from whatbird.com:



...as you can see, the critter shouldn't be at the very SE corner of Texas! If it strays another mile or two to the east, that's SW Louisiana ;-)

Happy migration; 140 spp in 2 days of birding, 1 more to go.