DUNCANVILLE, TEXAS — December has been warm. It was 80 degrees on Friday, and Saturday was nearly as hot. I’ve managed a few short birding trips over the last few days, and I’ve seen some good birds.

Monday, I nearly froze during a picnic lunch at Cedar Hill State Park — a cold front had briefly invaded, dropping temperatures into the 30s. A Forster’s Tern fed over the water, calling occasionally. A White-winged Dove fluttered around in the mesquite trees — surprising only because I usually see them in cities and suburbs this far north.

Several dozen Pine Siskins fed in the trees, calling and flitting around.

I had seen them a week earlier, on Monday the third, when I made a morning visit to the park. They are hanging out with House Finches and goldfinches, feeding on sunflower and ragweed heads and, apparently, hackberry fruits. I haven’t been able to spot any Purple Finches or, ahem, redpolls among the flock.

Harris’s Sparrows are present, vocal, and looking fine — oh yes.

Also on the third, I had a male Ladder-backed Woodpecker feeding in the mesquite brush at Joe Pool dam. I had heard that the species ranges as far east as Dallas County, but it was my first encounter with the species here. I was pretty excited. His crest caught the sun and practically glowed. Nice.

Saturday, I birded roads south of Wilmer in southern Dallas County, where I found a few Brewer’s Blackbirds and Eurasian Collared Doves.

Farther south, around Bardwell Lake west of Ennis, I had about 100 white pelicans, several Forster’s Terns, and a flock of about 40 American Pipits. Despite walking several grassy areas, I didn’t find any longspurs or Sprague’s Pipits, but I did do pretty well with sparrows: Swamp (gorgeous), Lincoln’s (exquisite), Song, Savannah, White-crowned, Harris’s, and Field.

Today was wet, warm, and muggy. I watched a gull fly past my office window. I think it’s supposed to get colder again overnight — please!

DUNCANVILLE, TEXAS — Saturday, Jason Pike and I took part in the 14th annual Caddo Lake Warm-up Winter Bird Count, a joint effort of the Northeast Texas Field Ornithologists and the Shreveport-based Bird Study Group. The count is always held on the first Saturday of December, so it isn’t a Christmas Bird Count, but it is conducted in the same way, with teams birding territories inside a 15-mile circle.

This circle straddles the Texas-Louisiana border and surrounds Caddo Lake. Caddo is the only naturally formed lake in the entire state of Texas, but it has been dammed and regulated by humans for the last century or so. It’s a beautiful and eerie maze of sloughs, bayous, bald cypress swamps, and marshes in the heart of the Piney Woods forests. This is the sixth year that Jason and I have done the count together (2001-05, 2007).

Most of the area Jason and I cover is wooded, so we struggle to find open-country species like Red-tailed Hawk, American Kestrel, and meadowlarks. This year, we found two red-tails and a Loggerhead Shrike, but we missed kestrels and meadowlarks. The area is also very rural. I don’t recall ever seeing a House Sparrow on our route, and the 12 starlings that we saw this year were more than we usually get — we’ve missed them entirely some years.

We also have very little open water, so we rarely get many waterfowl. This year we had 20 Wood Ducks, two Mallards, and 50 flyover Snow Geese (which was actually a good find). We couldn’t find a coot to save our lives.

Here’s what Caddo Lake looks like on a map:

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But here’s what it looks like in reality:

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You can see that there is very little open water on the Texas side of the lake; it’s mostly swamp.

Sadly, the complex Caddo ecosystem is vulnerable and deteriorating. One of many concerns is invasive exotics like water hyacinth, giant salvinia, and nutrias. It’s not a new story, really. The Caddo Indians who inhabited these lands were driven out long ago by invaders from far away. A few of their descendants still survive in Oklahoma, but their language — the language from which the word “Texas” is derived — is almost extinct.

There is a joy and comfort in getting to know a place and its birds — in expecting a Winter Wren on a certain stretch of road (yes, again), Inca Doves in Karnack (none) or Uncertain (three), Savannah Sparrows at the corner (yes) and chippies in the field (never fails). And of course, there are often surprises too — a woodcock sitting out in the sun, a very late Snowy Egret, or hundreds of Rusty Blackbirds flocking at dusk. This year, there were no woodcocks, snowies, or rusties, but we did have an Osprey overhead at the state park. Ospreys have been recorded on seven of the 14 counts so far. But we did even better than that — we found a bird that was not only new for the count but even for the Caddo Lake bird list:

GREENE CO., MO — Thanks for your well wishes in response to my Gulf Coast target list last weekend. Unfortunately, they weren’t enough to bring success in the venture.

It’s not really fair to complain about a trip that included Long-billed Curlews, Marbled Godwits, avocets, Snowy Plovers, and Roseate Spoonbills, but the fact is, Saturday just wasn’t one of those lucky days. I stared into cattails until I started hallucinating, but we couldn’t even find a Sora, let alone a Virginia Rail. And anis remain a jinx bird for another year.

Thousands of Snow Geese fed in the fields at Anahuac, and we picked out a few Greater White-fronteds too. The tide was way out at Bolivar Flats, so shorebirds were dispersed over vast expanses of sand. The saltmarsh, which should have been crawling with Seaside and sharp-tailed sparrows, was very quiet. Ah well.

The two most interesting sightings, for me, were the Neotropic Cormorants in breeding plumage and three Horned Grebes in flight over the Gulf.

I don’t recall ever seeing a grebe (of any sort) in flight before, but as I scanned the water from Bolivar Flats, I picked up three birds moving low over the water, flashing white secondaries. They didn’t seem right for loons or ducks. They finally landed, and I was able (barely) to get them in the scope. They bobbed in and out of sight on the waves, but as far as I could tell, they showed the black-and-white faces of Horned Grebes. Cool!

So, all of my target birds will have to wait for another day.

I have seen 386 bird species in Texas. Depending on your frame of reference, this may sound pretty good, until I tell you that the current Texas big year record is 522 species. Yeah, 522 species in one year.

Now, if you know me at all, you probably realize that accumulating a huge state list is not of particular interest to me. I am more interested in habitats, biomes, and ecoregions than in arbitrary political borders, but the fact remains that arbitrary political borders do sometimes slice up the world into convenient little chunks. So, it makes sense to look for gaps in my life list, identify species that I should be able to find in my current little chunk of the world, and concentrate on finding those species.

So I’ve made a list of birds I’d like to find in Texas between now and the time I leave the country again in late winter:

• Greater Scaup
• King Rail
• Virginia Rail
• Groove-billed Ani
• Sprague’s Pipit
• Smith’s Longspur
• Chestnut-collared Longspur

You’ve already seen most of those names. I didn’t include species that occur in distant corners of the state (for example, Steller’s Jay and Spotted Owl), because I doubt I’ll be able to travel that far in the next couple of months.

So that was my list as of last week, and of course, the very first new bird I got was one I’d chosen not to put on the list. Sunday, a Long-tailed Duck was reported from Village Creek in Fort Worth. Monday morning, I stopped by on my way up to Missouri, and I found a crowd of other birders already there.

Scanning hundreds of Buffleheads, pintails, and shovelers, I finally found the female Oldsquaw (Can I just say it, please? There, I said it. Oldsquaw.), who was diving frequently and staying under for long periods. Eventually she came up and stayed for awhile, preening and offering nice, if distant looks. Her stubby, “rubber ducky” shape and white face with a dark cap and cheek patch were very striking. Long-tailed Ducks are reported a few times a year across Texas, and I didn’t expect to be in the right place at the right time to see one. But this little gal was sitting pretty. Score!

I didn’t get any pictures because of the distance, but here’s one from another Metroplex birder: female Long-tailed Duck.

So, hurrah for Long-tailed Ducks! I’m a fan. Now, let’s get busy on those other species. Anybody want to join my team? A-pipiting we’ll go!

GREENE CO., MO — Last Saturday, Fjord and I found several Neotropic Cormorants in full breeding plumage at Anahuac NWR, east of Houston. They looked really spiffy (see photo below), and I started wondering what they’re doing with breeding plumes in mid-November. Are they winter breeders, like certain raptors? Or do they acquire their breeding plumage in autumn, like many dabbling ducks? David Sibley’s illustration of breeding plumage is labeled “Apr-May.”

I searched the Texbirds mailing list archive and found scattered references to breeding-plumaged neotrops in October and November, and I found a couple of posts emphasizing that the species breeds (and shows breeding plumage) during the autumn months in southern Texas (for example, this post by John Arvin). However, on the Upper Texas Coast, I have seen neotrops on the nest with nestlings in April and May.

So is the breeding season long and/or staggered on the UTC? Or are the birds we saw post-breeding wanderers from farther south?

Do any of my readers have any information about plumages and breeding cycles of Neotropic Cormorants?

DALLAS, TEXAS — Yesterday, the wind changed. For days, the wind had been hot, coming from the south. By noon, all the flags were pointing east; by 4 p.m., the air felt different, cooler, and the wind rushed down from the north. Crunchy leaves skittered over asphalt. It felt almost like autumn.

This morning, I found several hundred winter-plumaged Franklin’s Gulls at Joe Pool Lake. Most floated in a tight raft on the water. When something sent them swirling into the air, it was like looking into a snow globe. According to eBird graphs, huge numbers of Franklin’s Gulls pass through between mid-October and mid-November in a spike that trails off sharply by Nov. 15.

Thousands of coots feed on the hydrilla in the coves, and slowly the numbers and diversity of other waterfowl are building. I had Canvasbacks, Lesser Scaup, and Ring-necked Ducks for the first time this season, plus wigeons and Blue-winged Teal. Cormorant and Ring-billed Gull numbers are picking up too.

I heard American Goldfinches for the first time this season, and pipits and Savannah Sparrows are around. Otherwise, though, wintering passerines are just not around. I have yet to encounter a White-throated Sparrow this year, and Yellow-rumps are very sparse. Where are the flocks of juncos? Or the flocks of kinglets? The brush is silent and still.

People in other parts of the state are also complaining about the lack of wintering birds, and some have theorized that the mild autumn hasn’t yet pushed them south this year.

This is our third or fourth cool front this fall, but we’re still nowhere close to a frost. So far, seven days this month have hit 80 degrees or higher. Before the cool front came through yesterday, we reached a high of 82. Wow.