On Saturday morning, July 7, Jim Ziebol and I took a quick trip to Horseshoe Lake to see the Neotropic Cormorant Frank Holmes had found there several days earlier.
It was good to get out after weeks of not venturing beyond city parks and the backyard.
We got to Horseshoe Lake around 8:20. Shortly after turning on to Big Bend Rd., I spotted a heron in a tree on the near shore. It was a Yellow-crowned Night-Heron, my first of the year. I was thrilled to get a few fairly decent snaps of it.
After admiring it for several minutes and pointing it out to another local birder who stopped to see what we were looking at, we drove to the cormorant tree. Although there were a number of Double-cresteds perched, we didn’t see the Neotropic amongst them. The Double-cresteds were looking gorgeous in the morning sun, and I took a few photos.
We decided to check out the dredge area before heading over to the Hwy. 111 side to look for the bird there. As we approached the railroad tracks we saw that the part of the lake just before the tracks was filled with herons.
As a train approached, 10 to 12 Black-crowned Night-Herons were flushed from the railroad tracks, to which they returned once the train had passed.
We saw several species of butterflies along Layton Rd. on the way to the dredge, including Southern Dogface, and Orange Sulphurs at the dredge, but no cormorants. On our way back, we ran into Frank, who told us that the Neotropic had returned to the cormorant tree. He led the way back to the tree, where a small group of birders was looking through a scope that was set up. I got a good look through the scope just before the bird flew. A beauty, with a remainder of white about its ear, and incidentally, a life bird for me.
We decided to skip the 111 side and went to the pools at Gateway Sand. There wasn’t a lot of bird activity there (although we did see an immature male Orchard Oriole), but there were a lot of butterflies. One female Orange Sulphur was in a deep tire rut holding her wings flat and arching her abdomen, behavior, Jim told me, intended to repel male attentions. I did see a male approach her, then leave—when he had flown on, she folded her wings. New behavior for me, and quite interesting.
It was a good morning. Any one of several of our sightings (including the female Orange Sulphur’s behavior) would have been worth the trip, which turned out to be more of a butterflying excursion than a birding one.
Butterflies on the 203 side:
- Checkered White
- Cabbage White
- Orange Sulphur
- Southern Dogface
- Little Yellow
- Sleepy Orange
- Cloudless Sulphur
- Eastern Tailed-Blue
- Pearl Crescent
- Question Mark
- Red Admiral
- American Snout
- Common Buckeye
- Viceroy
- Monarch
- Southern Northern Cloudywing
Here’s a photo of the Southern Northern Cloudywing ([still] a life butterfly):
I find the skippers daunting. However, the roughly hourglass-shaped white median spot and the white patch at the bend of the antennal club on this butterfly are apparently diagnostic—but I would be happier with the ID if the face had been whiter and if I could have seen the white behind the eye.
CORRECTION: (July 12, 2007) Jim checked several sources, which are more authoritative than the one I used. Apparently the whiteness of the face overrules the criteria I used to identify the skipper. It’s a Northern Cloudywing, after all.
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