Greetings from High Island along the Gulf coast in Texas. We arrived to this very small campground Saturday, April 3, set up, and decided to sit out with a cup of coffee until it got too cool. While hanging out, a woman with the local Methodist church came by with lots of leftover desserts from a bbq earlier today and offered them up to us campers. Yay! We ate chocolate and banana cream pie for a late lunch!

Today, Easter Sunday, we drove over to Boy Scout Woods, a migrant hotspot for the island. We purchased our patches for entry into the various sanctuaries here. We were told that birding was slow this morning, so we decided to venture off the island for lunch and to bird at Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge.

Lots of great birds as we drove route 124 to the refuge. Once we arrived to the entrance to Anahuac, we turned the car off, and it wouldn't start again. This has been a frequent problem lately, so we are carrying an extra battery in the truck to charge the battery under the hood as needed. We stayed inside the refuge for just a short while so we will return another day this week.

From the little bit that we have seen, High Island is kind of run-down. Upon our return from Anahuac, we drove a few blocks down Gulf Way Road (Street?) from our campground to the Gulf, and that beach area was, well, ugly! Big barriers blocked access to the water, so we couldn't dip our toes in. But, to make up for the ugliness, we had some great birds here! Caspian tern, common tern, sandwich tern, laughing gull, ring-billed gull, and herring gull. Plus brown pelican!

I'll post each day to tell you about where we've been and what we have seen. Meanwhile, here's the bird species list for today:

Blue-winged teal

Northern shoveler

Pied-billed grebe

Eurasian collared-dove

American coot

Black-necked stilt

Black-bellied plover

Killdeer

Laughing gull

Ring-billed gull

Herring gull