Nalle Bunny Run 2017-08-19

7 people joined me this morning at 8:00 for the monthly group walk on Hill Country Conservancy's Nalle Bunny Run Wildlife Preserve in west Austin. In a little over 2 hours we covered about 1.1 miles, making a rough circuit of the property, looking and listening for birds and other wildlife. Here are some highlights.

The first and biggest highlight was finding this juvenile Great Horned Owl shortly after turning east onto the trail towards the spring. There are often owls in this section of the preserve, but I can only remember one other time when I spotted an owl before it spotted us and flew away. This one tolerated our watching it for a few minutes before flying across the trail and into the woods to the north. Look at those huge feet and talons!

Down the hill in the oak-juniper woods we got to observe the presence of a mixed-species foraging flock of songbirds, mostly Northern Cardinals, Carolina Chickadees, and Black-crested Titmice. They were hard to see in the dense woods, but if you listened carefully you could hear their contact calls all around us. I talked a bit about Bird Language, and how we were experiencing base-line behavior of the birds quietly foraging while staying in ear-shot of each other.

Near the northeast corner of the preserve, right where the sandy prairie meets the oak-juniper woods, I spotted a dragonfly with green eyes and yellow stripes flying around. I've seen these flying around this area before, but I've never been able to photograph or identify one because they never landed for me. Today, this one landed! I was just as excited about this as I was about the owl! I'm 99% sure it's a Royal River Cruiser, a species I've never found before:

On the sandy prairie area we found two more cool insects, first this orange and black velvet ant, a kind of flightless wasp. It was running around on the sand, digging little exploratory holes:

And we found another dragonfly, this female Eastern Amberwing. It's the smallest dragonfly species in Texas, only about 1 inch long:

We only saw two south-bound migrating birds this morning, both female Orchard Orioles. Here's a distant photo I got of one of them. Orioles are in the blackbird family, and you can see this one's typical blackbird-like pointy bill:

We ended up finding 24 species of birds. Here's our complete bird list on eBird.

And here are the same photos on Flickr.

Posted on August 19, 2017 09:20 PM by mikaelb