Photo credit: Dana Nelson, Cattail Marsh, December 18, 2018
You are welcome to attend monthly meetings, featuring speakers on birding and natural history topics, and including a delicious member-provided evening meal -- with desserts! Our monthly field trips are fun and educational, and focus on locations along the coast, marshes, prairies, and forests of the area.
Membership Meeting
Thursday May 16, 2024 7:00 p.m.
Garden Center, Tyrrell Park, Beaumont
Your Favorite Bird Pictures
Dr. Harlan Stewart has again volunteered to prepare all photos submitted in advance into a Powerpoint presentation. The contributors of the pictures are encouraged to talk briefly about their pictures telling where they were taken etc. Contributions should be no more than about 10 pictures. The pictures should be bird related and have been taken in the last two years, but do not need to be exhibition quality, especially if the subject is especially interesting for any reason.
In order to prepare a combined presentation, we will need to have the pictures by Monday morning May 13. They can be emailed as attachments to Harlan at hstewartmail@gt.rr.com; If necessary, send several separate emails. The pictures can to compressed to about 50 percent of original to reduce the number of emails needed, but if you are not easily able to compress them, just send them without compression. If you cannot send them to Harlan by May 13, we may be able to show pictures you prepare yourself if they are on a flash drive, and are in the Powerpoint format. We much prefer advance submission, and, depending on how many are submitted, we might not have time to show many or even any that are not submitted in advance. Please come early to work out any kinks if you want to do anything other than show still pictures and talk about them.
We plan to have the doors open no later than 6:00 p.m., and have light refreshments available by about 6:15 p.m.
Saturday, May 18, 2024.
Field Trip to Hardin County
This is a great opportunityto see the breeding songbirds of the southern part of the Big Thicket. We will focus on the area north of Silsbee to look for the breeding birds of the area. This is typically a half-day trip.We plan to look for the nesting species of the area – Pine, Swainson's, Hooded, Kentucky, Prairie, Prothonotary, and Pine Warblers, Yellow-breasted Chat, White-eyed, Red-eyed and Yellow-throated Vireo, Indigo and Painted Bunting, Gray Catbird, Summer Tanager, Acadian Flycatcher, Brown-headed Nuthatch and others. We will likely not find all the listed species, but most years we find a good selection of them. Swainson's Warbler is a particular target of this trip, and we have often been rewarded with excellent views of this normally very secretive species on this field trip. This area is also one of the easiest places to find breeding Prairie Warblers, typically in plantations of about 20-foot-tall young pines. Usually, we bird Gore Store Road east as far as Beech Creek, Firetower Road, and Matigwa Road, but we will probably check some new roads where pines are reaching the desired stages.
The meeting time and place will be at 7:00 a.m. (note the necessary early start if we are to find the breeding birds!) at the shopping center on the northeast corner of the intersection of FM92 and FM418 in the northern part of Silsbee. To reach this from Beaumont, take US 69 north and then US 96 north. Take Business 96 into and through downtown Silsbee. When Business 96 turns right, continue straight on FM92 for 3/4 mile to the shopping center. We normally finish sometime around noon.