In late April I traveled to central Texas (the Austin area) to visit my sister and her husband and to photograph some of their spring migrants, some of which remain in that area for the summer months.  It affords me the opportunity to see and photograph birds which don’t occur in western Washington.

My sister and her husband are Master Naturalists and live on and maintain land that they treat as a nature preserve.  Their land is located in a rural area and they supplement the native landscape with bird feeders, bird baths and a watercourse.  These features afford me the opportunity for sitting in the shade, visiting with my sister and her husband and observing and photographing many species of birds for 8-10 hours (yep!) a day.

I have several days of photographs so I think I’ll just choose a few good photographs from each day and post them.  This might result in some duplication of species, but every photograph is different.  The photos on this post were all taken on April 22, 2018.  For the record, I returned home with exactly 1200 images and retained 806 of those images (about 67%) which is far too many but that’s what terabyte hard drives are all about.

I’ll apologize to any non-PacNW readers viewing these first two images, but Northern cardinals are birds I am often asked about regarding my trips down south, so they are of interest to some of my local readers.  And since they are colorful, abundant and relatively easy to photograph, you may see more from this Texas trip.

Moving on to somewhat more interesting birds, this is the Nashville warbler, probably the most common warbler I encounter on my trips to central Texas.

Another relatively common spring visitor (and I believe somewhat rarer year-round resident) is the Black and White warbler, one of my favorite birds.  This one is probably a male.

This next bird was something of a surprise.  It’s a Pine siskin, often our most numerous (winter) visitor here at our house in the PacNW but one I’m not sure I ever saw when living in Texas.  For several years my wife and I lived on a greenbelt near downtown Austin and I remember from some 30 years ago, one of central Texas’ premier birders asking me if we had them on our feeders.  It seemed a puzzlement him that we did not.

And finally, for the day, a rare central Texas visitor… the Pancho Villa titmouse!