Highlight of the Year 2014

As I mentioned last week, the past month has been extraordinary for me. After our duck hunting excursion with no wood duck spotted, we left the area and decided to drive along a very rough, filled-with-potholes-everywhere-type road to the Lagoon. Along Laguna Madre, the rough road is Laguna Shores Drive. Of course by the name of the road you'd expect a beautiful surrounding area. Not so. The area smells badly, the homes all on stilts/piers are run down for the most part, the shore is lined in spots with abandoned, run down boats, etc. Well, you get the picture, right? Trust me, it's not a pleasant drive at all. And, naturally, when you're out birding, you want to drive at a slow pace to scour the shoreline for water fowl...but the local traffic doesn't allow that; there is absolutely no good place to pull off this time of year since we have had so many rainstorms come through the area. The sandy shore is littered with clay also, so don't wanna pull off and get stuck.

Okay, so now that's out of the way, we were driving along at a good clip when all of a sudden I spotted them. Three of them. I could NOT believe what I saw!! Go figure. I said to Bud...in a screeching kinda voice..."I think those are black swans!!" "It just can't be. They're Australian birds when in their natural habitat!" We had to drive on. No place to pull off the road. We made a U turn at the first intersection we came to, and headed back to the spot. We found a small area of black top that was a bit unsafe to stop, but we pulled off the road the best we could. The swans were too far away, no place to get out without sinking in mire, so we stayed in the car, rolled down the windows, and while Bud viewed them with the binoculars, I tried to zoom in on them from afar. The day was another overcast, dreary gray. I continued to take a few more photos and then just watched a short time before we left when the traffic cleared out enough for us to pull back out on the road safely.

We returned again the very next day in hopes of seeing them again with a clear blue sky filled with sunshine. That was a no-go...they were gone. We drove the entire length of shoreline for about 5 miles before it ended....no more black swans.

Now, tho it was a rare sighting, the more we thought about it, we kinda figured they were bred and raised for 'pets' and released out in the wild, as with some other black swans noted in other parts of the world besides Australia and New Zealand...maybe zoo escapees? [but zoo birds have their wings clipped if they're not caged, right?] Perhaps, who knows. Either that or they surely took a wrong turn over Albuquerque. rofl. I just hope they will survive wherever they are now!!!

When we returned home that day I made sure I checked Black Swans in Texas with the e-bird sightings. Only ONE other entry and that was back in April of this year...then, when I went out to e-bird to retrieve the map for this post someone else spotted them in the same area 5 days prior to us....if you notice the text within the spotting window...'between Caribbean and SPID'---that SPID stands for South Padre Island Drive that takes you to the islands.


BLACK SWAN
photos taken: Laguna Madre Shores - Flour Bluff, Texas [suburb of Corpus Christi]
Australian habitat map:

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