Thankfully yesterday Kay and I had a pretty good day at High Island before being chased by torrential rain, flood conditions and a dismal 4 day forcast today. We started at Boy Scout Woods, the Houston Audubon Societies refuge, and spent an hour or so ourselves before joining the first of 3 free guided walks by Tropical Birding & HAS. It started slow, but picked up as the day progressed. Best birds of the morning were Blackpoll Warbler (first of the season for this area), B&W Warbler, Am Redstart, N Waterthrush, both tanagers, Orchard and Baltimore Orioles, RB Grosbeak, and others. We joined them again for inland shorebirding (coast roads flooded) and added Upland sandpipers, Am Golden Plover, and Pectoral Sandpiper, along with Western, Least, Semipalmated sandpipers, dunlin, SP Plover, both Yellowlegs, and a bird I did not list as it was a very distant flyby I couldn’t ID Hudsonian Godwit.
In the evening again the group went to Smith Oaks Rookery area for more warblering adding Yellow-throated warbler and vireo, Blackburnian warbler, worm-eating warbler, Kay had Overbird that I missed, Red-eyed vireo, White-eyed vireo and finished with the spectacular rookery with many hundreds of egrets, herons, Neotropic commerants on nests.
This morning we planned on a short stop at BS Woods, then to head to the coast for sparrows, waders, shorebirds and terns/gulls. Unfortunately about 8:45 it started a torrential downpour and all of the coast roads towards Bolivar were closed. We thought we’d tough it our and drive north to a spot for Swainson’s warbler, but the highways were closed enroute, so we headed back. As we looked more at the weather it was clear it would stay this way for at least 2 more days, so we bailed and headed for San Antonio. Again foiled we couldn’t find a reasonable highway past Houston that was open and we got a room in town for the night on Priceline.