Finally...

In more ways than one.

Today, with Dave Patton, I made my first trip of the year to the coast, and only my second or third trip down since mid-October.  We never even actually never made it as far as the beach today, but at least we made it to within a few hundred yards.  So--finally--some coastal birding.

After birding in circles in December (CBC circles) and birding in boxes in January (surveying quads for the winter bird atlas), it was nice to be able to do some free-form birding.  One of our goals today was to see a Green-tailed Towhee, a bird that's typically almost mythical in Louisiana.  However, this is no typical year, and almost 20 of these western towhees have been found in the state thus far during the cool season.

When the first few towhees were found this year, I figured it might be wise to chase one while I could.  Green-tailed Towhees are incredibly rare in Louisiana, after all.  When would I ever get another chance?
I've never been the biggest fan of chasing or I'd have gone over the 400 species mark for Louisiana years ago.  I passed on the Rock Wren in Cade, the Painted Redstart in Hackberry, on Lazuli Buntings, Lark Bunting, etc., opting and hoping to find my own instead.  I'm still looking for all of those birds years later, so maybe the towhee was one I might be wise to chase.

The first Saturday I got, I decided to take advantage of the predicted cold sunny morning  to go see the staked-out towhee.  I was figuring it would jump up in the first warm rays of the sun and be easy to see.  Only problem was, it was cloudy, warm, and next to a duck pond on the first day of duck season.  After that day, I decided I could put the towhee dream on the back burner, and hopefully just find my own.  Since then, report after report has filtered in.  Some CBCs had up to 3 Green-tails, but I scratched.  I figured towhees might be hanging out with White-crowned Sparrows, but I went whole CBCs without seeing any White-crowned Sparrows, either.  By this weekend, I'd finally had enough.  I called Dave and asked if he wanted to go see someone else's towhee.

We thought about some locations, and found a few likely ones.  Erik Johnson, the undisputed king of Green-tailed Towhees after finding a nice handful of them, had reported one lately from Broussard Beach, so we tried there. No luck.  Tons of sparrows, just didn't see a towhee.  I'd bet there's still one there; we just didn't see it. Then we tried one Melvin Weber had found.  No luck there, either.

So we decided to start heading back inland.  On the way back, we saw flocks of sparrows on the roadside and stopped to take looks.  Just east of Willow Island, we stopped at a good sparrow spot, parked, and started to enjoy the sparrow show.  We started comparing variation in young White-crowned Sparrows' head colors, and basically forgot all about towhees.  Dave was mentioning how bright reddish or orange the central crown color of some white-crowns is when a bird with a really bright reddish orange crown hopped up out of the brush right next to the truck.  Uh...uh...uh...Green-tailed Towhee!    

We got great looks and listens at the towhee.  Super cool bird.

Finally...