Sadly, by May 10, 2015, my visit to family in Central Texas was winding down.  However, it wasn’t quite the end of my birding experiences.

The first thing that morning I noticed some activity on a back fence, all the way across our effective viewing area and out of the range of any hope of good photos.  It was a female House finch sitting on a fence playing with some spear grass seed stems.  I watched and photographed the bird for a full five minutes.  A slight wind was moving the stems of the plant back and forth in front of the barbed wire strand on which the bird was sitting, and the bird kept leaning out to try and grasp the stems.  As I said, these are not great photos but they provided me with some amusement watching the antics of the finch.

The bird was finally successful at removing one of the seed stems…

I also obtained this nice photo of a Carolina chickadee.  It looks very similar to our (PacNW) Black-capped chickadee but fortunately their ranges don’t overlap either here or in Texas so identification isn’t a problem.

And perhaps saving the best for last, on this day we took a little driving excursion to an area where we had found a Vermillion flycatcher the previous year.  It, or one of its ‘brothers’, was back!  The area this flycatcher prefers is very open, so despite my efforts I was unable to get very close to the bird and the following photograph seemed like about the best I might obtain…

Not a bad photo, but if it had been the only one I was able to obtain I would have been somewhat disappointed.  However my sharp-eyed sister saw it make a couple of trips to a tree limb and she spotted a nest in the branches.  The male was feeding the female which remained on the nest.  The nest was beside the road we were on so it opened much improved possibilities for photographs… from the car!

And finally, the best photo I could get of the female snuggled down into the nest with sticks and a limb interfering with my view and focus…

This wraps it up for this year’s series on Texas.  Since I returned I’ve been taking a LOT of photos of spring migrants in our yard on Fidalgo Island.  Some of them will be the next photos posted to the blog.