By the first week of April, in an effort to "flatten the curve" of coronavirus infection Austin had already been living under the March 24 "
Stay Home - Work Safe Order" for about a week. I've never experienced anything like this and was having a hard time with stress and anxiety at home by myself. Out in the Davis Mountains of west Texas, my friend DD Currie was about to experience a similar order starting on Saturday April 4. So she decided to comply with the order by doing a Big Sit in her yard and invited anyone in Texas to join her in their yards either on Saturday or Sunday. (A Big Sit is a birding game played by seeing how many species of bird you can see or hear from one spot in one day.) She would gather species lists from everyone who participated, and she called it the Texas Quarantine Party.
Desperately needing a distraction, I decided to participate. To make it a little more social, I called it the Behrens Manor Big Sit (jokingly referring to my very average-sized suburban house and yard). I created a Skype meeting that I'd keep open all day on my laptop so people could virtually drop in to say hi and follow my progress. On Saturday I got all my weekend chores done, and on Sunday April 5 I was free to bird all day in my yard.
I got started on Sunday morning a little before 5:45 AM in order to try and hear night birds or birds migrating at night. Just a minute or two after I started I heard two Eastern Screech-Owls in my neighbor's yard behind mine. One was doing its "whinny" song and the other the monotonic trill. With these two creepy sounds, the count had started!
It took 45 minutes before I recorded my next bird, a White-winged Dove that started singing at around 6:30. 15 minutes later a birding phenomenon called the dawn chorus started and most of the expected species started to sing and call. The first birds I actually
saw were a few Great-tailed Grackles that flew over my yard just after 7 AM when it was finally getting light enough to see clearly. (It was overcast and cold all morning, and I had to move around and drink lots of coffee to stay comfortable.) By 7:15 I had recorded 14 species of birds.
The first really exciting moment was at 7:41 AM. I was standing under the trees over my driveway watching some songbirds when I heard the flight call of an Upland Sandpiper for the second time that morning. (The first time I heard it was at 6:45 but it was a single call, heard-only.) The call repeated a couple times and I came out from under the trees just in time to see about 40 Upland Sandpipers flying in V formation heading east. In our neighborhood we usually only get to
hear this species during spring and fall migration during the night or early in the morning. It was amazing to see this group fly past!
At 8:54 I heard an odd squeally call and then watched 2 Black-bellied Whistling Ducks fly low over my yard from the west, circle overhead, and return in the direction they'd come from. I only have a handful of observations of this species in my yard, so this was a real treat. These large exotically plumaged ducks are year-round residents that have been expanding their range north from south Texas over the last few decades.
A little after 10 AM an interesting woodpecker showed up. Initially I thought it was a female Red-bellied Woodpecker but there were a few strange things about it. The nape was orangish red instead of pure red, and its cere was yellow. There were not many dark bands on its central tail feathers, and when I got glimpses of the belly, it was yellowish instead of reddish. It turns out this was a hybrid between Red-bellied Woodpecker and Golden-fronted Woodpecker. One of the cool things about birding in central Texas is that we have several pairs of similar species, one eastern and one western, whose ranges overlap here. One such pair is Red-bellied Woodpecker (eastern) and Golden-fronted Woodpecker (southwestern). In west Austin you can find both, and sometimes they interbreed! Here are a couple photos:
Throughout the day there was a mixed-species foraging flock of songbirds that cycled through my yard half a dozen times. (Many songbirds form these flocks in the winter since they are not split up on separate breeding territories like they are in the summer. They all watch for danger and listen to each other's contact and alarm calls.) When the flock arrived the trees were became alive with movement and it was so fun to try and identify all the species that were in it. Near as I could tell, this flock was composed of a few Carolina Chickadees and Black-crested Titmice (which usually make up the core of these kinds of flocks), about 10 Blue-gray Gnatcatchers (a north-bound midrange), a few Yellow-rumped Warbers, Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Chipping Sparrows and an Orange-crowned Warbler (all winter residents), and one or two bright yellow Nashville Warblers (a north-bound migrant). Here are a few photos I got of some of these birds throughout the day: