We had a beautiful, sunny winter day here, so decided to head to one of our favorite state parks for a morning of birding. South Llano River State Park is about 90 minutes from our home, and the temperature was 30 degrees when we set out and 32 degrees when we arrived! But the sun was shining and the wind was calm, so it was a perfect day to be out hiking and birding.
South Llano River State Park features four different birding blinds, each with a water feature and feeders. One of our last volunteer gigs was here, and we were out each morning around 7:00 to make sure that all of the feeders were filled by 8:00. Birders tend to be early birds, and photography is best in the early morning light.
So imagine our thoughts when we arrived at the first blind around 9:00 to find that the feeders had not been filled! We checked the next two blinds, and they'd also not been filled. We finally saw the hosts making their rounds at around 10:30, so we headed off for a hike to give them a chance to service all of the blinds. After our hike we came back to the blinds to find the birds happily feeding on the freshly placed seed.
We ended up seeing 31 species of birds, and here are some of the better pictures that I got. As always, you can click on a picture to get a larger, clearer version.
Winter is a great time to see various sparrows in Texas, and while they all seem like LBJ's (little brown jobs) they vary quite a bit.
The water features are popular, even in winter. This male House Finch was nice and bright.
A mixture of peanut butter, lard, and cornmeal appeals to birds that don't eat seed, like woodpeckers. That is what is smeared on this log feeder.
Woodhouse's Scrub-Jay is the western equivalent to the well known Blue Jay. It was interesting to see how their color seemed to change depending on if they were in the shade, or out in the bright sunlight.
Mark
