April 11-17, 2026 with John Coons & Alex Sundvall
We enjoyed a fun week of birding in the Piney Woods of East Texas and the Upper Texas Coast. Although we did not experience a fallout since the weather was too good, we did find a lot of birds during our days. On Saturday evening, we gathered for dinner at our motel near the Houston airport and went over the plan for the next couple of days. In the morning, we headed up to Jones State Forest and soon after arriving had nice looks at Red-cockaded Woodpeckers working on the trunks of the pines. We also enjoyed a Pileated and a couple of Red-headed Woodpeckers, one of the prettiest of all the woodpeckers. Another southeast US specialty, Brown-headed Nuthatch, showed well and we also saw Wood Ducks, a perched Great Horned Owl, Pine Warblers, and Eastern Bluebirds. Traveling east, we made a stop near the Trinity River and had nice views of Prothonotary and Hooded warblers and Northern Parula. We headed on to Kountze, Texas, for lunch before some afternoon birding in the big thicket habitat north of town. We had great views of our main target, Swainson’s Warbler, along the roadside, as well as a singing Prairie Warbler, Yellow-throated Warbler, Common Yellowthroat, and a wonderful Barred Owl that swooped in and landed along a creek. Along the BA Steinhagen Lake we saw our first waterbirds which included Anhinga, Common Gallinule, Little Blue and Great Blue herons, and Great Egret. White-eyed Vireos and Carolina Chickadees also showed well here, as did our first Scissor-tailed Flycatchers. After checking in to our motel in Jasper, we enjoyed the Sunday buffet at the Cedar Tree, which had desserts seemingly from the 60’s.
After breakfast the next morning we made a short drive into the pine savanna habitat ,where our goal was the quite local Bachman’s Sparrow. We heard a few from the road but eventually had to walk into the woods to get a look, where we spotted a singing male on a limb of a pine. We enjoyed its beautiful song for several minutes. On our drive out, Alex spotted a group of five migrating Mississippi Kites perched in a dead tree. We returned to our motel to checkout before making our way south toward the Texas Coast. We made a stop at Cattail Marsh near Beaumont, where we saw both Black-bellied and Fulvous whistling-ducks, Purple Gallinules, Soras, White and White-faced ibis, many Snowy Egrets, Fish Crow, Purple Martins, and we compared Boat-tailed and Great-tailed grackles. We headed to lunch, then made our way to our motel in Winnie for an early check-in before driving south to High Island and the migration woodlots. We found a number of new birds, but the highlight was a visit to the rookery at Smith Oaks where we had great views of nesting Great and Snowy egrets showing bright breeding colors on their bills, lores, and legs, many Tricolored Herons, Neotropic Cormorants, and the stars… Roseate Spoonbills showing their pink bodies with orange tails.
On our first morning near the Texas Coast, we birded some wet fields for a few shorebirds, including a couple of Buff-breasted Sandpipers. We had a wonderful experience with a King Rail right next to the road. We then headed to Anahuac (now Jocelyn Nungaray) NWR where we spotted a wonderful American Bittern trying to hide in the reeds, a cooperative Sedge Wren, then a locally rare Least Grebe and lots of American Alligators sun bathing. At the refuge entrance, a family of Barn Owls showed well in the roof of the old visitor’s center. A drive around the marshes and ponds at the refuge found a fair number of shorebirds, including Black-necked Stilts, American Avocets, Semipalmated Plovers, lots of Lesser Yellowlegs, fewer Greater Yellowlegs, many Stilt Sandpipers, Gull-billed and Forster’s terns, a Least Bittern, Yellow-crowned Night-Heron, Crested Caracaras, and nesting Cliff Swallows, among others. We headed to lunch at a BBQ place and had a siesta at the motel before heading back to High Island in the afternoon. There were more birds around than the previous day. We watched one of the drips, and Worm-eating, Tennessee, Prothonotary, and Blue-winged warblers all showed in just a couple of minutes. Both Scarlet and Summer tanagers and a fair number of Orchard Orioles showed well along with Yellow-billed Cuckoos, and a couple of Swainson’s Thrushes that were even singing in the woods.
On Wednesday morning, we made our way through High Island on to the Bolivar Peninsula, with a stop at Rollover Pass, where we got our first real taste of coastal birds. Marbled Godwits, Willets, and Black Skimmers greeted us on the bay side of the pass as a Reddish Egret danced in the water. A fair number of Royal, Forster’s, and Least terns were on the sandbar. We had a nice experience with a Clapper Rail that walked between clumps of reeds. Further down the peninsula we had nice views of both Seaside Sparrow, a resident species, and a couple of wonderful Nelson’s Sparrows that were lingering from the winter before heading back north. Then it was on to the Bolivar Flats Shorebird Sanctuary. Driving along the beach, we had rather close views of Wilson’s, Piping, and Snowy plovers amongst the Black-bellied Plovers. We walked the beach at the sanctuary where there were good numbers of Sanderlings, Dunlin, and Black and Least terns as well as Sandwich Terns, Ruddy Turnstones, and more Reddish Egrets. With the higher tide we went to a more inland tide pool and saw about 400 American Avocets. Some of us spotted a Bottle-nosed Dolphin at the entrance to Galveston Bay during a snack and pit stop. After lunch, we headed back up the peninsula and stopped at Rollover Pass again, where the lower tide was conducive to us seeing American Oystercatcher. We made our way back to High Island in hopes of afternoon arriving migrants. An Ovenbird and Kentucky Warbler came to the water drip, as did a brilliant male Painted Bunting and Northern Waterthrush. We encountered more orioles, tanagers, catbirds and Indigo Buntings here as well. A post dinner visit to Winnie’s Dairy Queen was a big hit.
On Thursday we went east from Winnie through the edge of Port Arthur to the small town of Sabine Pass and Sabine Woods, which is owned by the Texas Ornithological Society. We spent a couple of hours walking the trails in the woods and found a fair number of migrants. We had our first seen Great Crested Flycatcher, as well as a Great Kiskadee that had been around here most of the spring. It spent most of its time in the treetops but we had a brief perched view and saw it fly a couple of times. This is the place to see White-winged Doves. We took a break and went down the coast to Sea Rim State Park where we checked the beach and saw more of the specialty plovers, Wilson’s, Snowy, and Piping as well as Least, Western, and Semipalmated sandpipers. As we were preparing our picnic lunch and checking out the American Avocets, Black-necked Stilts, and a pair of Mottled Ducks, an American Alligator slipped up a side channel of the tidal marsh and watched us intently from across the lawn. We returned to Sabine Woods after lunch to see if any birds were coming in from across the Gulf. We had looks at Blue-headed Vireo, Yellow-breasted Chat, Yellow-throated Warbler, more waterthrushes and Prothonotary Warbler, but our hoped for fallout was dashed by the southerly winds that were carrying the migrants further inland. We made our way back on a circuitous route to Winnie stopping to check a riparian area and to look for flooded rice fields on roads that are rarely checked.
On our final day, we packed up the van and headed to some pastures, where we spent a bit of time watching and listening to displaying Upland Sandpipers, as well as a field with close to 100 Buff-breasted Sandpipers that were practicing their display they will need on their far north tundra breeding grounds, where a male shows his pale underwings to a female as he walks about. We headed to a canal bridge and saw a few Cave Swallows mixed in with Cliff Swallows and got some info on a wet muddy field not far away. We dashed there and found one of the best local shorebirds, Hudsonian Godwit, with a handful of Hudsonian Whimbrels, 500 Lesser Yellowlegs and many Dunlin. We had to start making our way to the airport, so we headed off and made a pit stop at one of the few remaining Stuckey’s, where Stephen could not resist getting us all donuts in celebration of all the birds and the roughly 15 different donuts shops we saw in East Texas. Getting back into the piney woods, we made one more birding stop at Lake Charlotte, where we had one last look at a Northern Parula, a flock of Cedar Waxwings, and Alex spotted a rare inland Sandwich Tern and a flying Common Loon. We arrived with time to spare for flights and dropped a couple of us at the motel and the others at the airport terminals. It was great fun birding with all of you and seeing a bunch of cool birds on their way north and to experience a bit of East Texas culture along the way. Good birding and Alex and I hope to see you again.
Mammals encountered on our Texas tour:
Swamp Rabbit (Sylvilagus aquaticus)
Marsh Rice Rat (Oryzomys palustris)
Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis)
Eastern Fox Squirrel (Sciurus niger)
Common Bottleose Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus)
Coyote (Canis latrans)
You can see my complete trip report on eBird at this link: https://ebird.org/tripreport/507743
You can download a combined PDF of this page and the eBird report at this link: https://fieldguides.com/triplists/mig26aTRIPLIST.pdf
-- John Coons