ter CUmee LU beOIN #6 Ui Lele bh ba oN 5 
Sikeston, Mo., well after dark. We got 21 the next day, driving as far as 
Little Rock, Ark.; 19 the third day going to Nacogdoches, Tex., and 23 the 
fourth day, reaching Houston shortly after noon. All were observed from 
the car with few stops of more than a few minutes in likely spots. None 
was remarkable. We were surprised that in our entire trip we heard not 
one western meadowlark, which we get regularly only a few miles north- 
west of Chicago. The eastern sang for us all the way and even in the Rio 
Grande valley. We were told that the western lark is occasional near 
Houston. Sparrow hawks, loggerhead shrikes, and mockingbirds were the 
most frequent roadside birds of this part of the trip. 
After getting established Saturday in a tourist court at the south edge 
of Houston, I called George Williams, a faculty member of Rice Institute, 
who edits the Texas section of the Field Notes for the National Aubudon 
Society. I had written to him a few weeks earlier asking for suggestions as 
to where we should look for birds in the Houston-Galveston area. His reply 
came promptly and included an offer to guide us personally on a tour if we 
had room in our car, and could make it ‘Friday or Sunday. Our party of 
four was in two cars as far as Houston, one thereafter, so we set out early 
Sunday morning with Mr. Williams, Anne and I in one car and his son 
Stephen, 14, and Bernard and Prudence, Anne’s parents, in the other. 
Stephen is about as good at bird identification as is his father, so the ar- 
rangement was perfect. 
I have heard all my life of southern hospitality. I thought I had ex- 
-perienced it in generous quantity in three previous vacation trips through 
South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. But I must say that Texas hospi- 
tality such as we encountered surpasses any description. Everywhere a 
mutual interest in birds was all the introduction needed when meeting the 
specialist in a given area. He or she would drop everything to devote all 
time and energy to making your birding experiences a complete success. 
The Williamses in Houston, Mrs. Jack Hagar in Rockport, Mr. and Mrs. 
Irby Davis and Mr. and Mrs. Terry Gill in Harlingen, simply outdid them- 
selves in helping us find all the birds that could be seen. 
We took a somewhat roundabout way to Galveston with several stops 
for woods birds. It was too early for the big migration waves, but we ran 
up a list of 90 birds for the day, boosting our trip list from 40 to 101. Gal- 
veston island is a flat treeless terrain, for the most part, with numerous 
small ponds and watery meadows which were alive with ducks and shore- 
birds. We saw our first long-billed curlews, in flocks of a dozen or more, 
our first mountain plover, and our first white-faced glossy ibis for our life 
lists. Most of the birds were familiar eastern species. The black-necked 
stilts were a beautiful find though, and Williams said it was the earliest 
record for them that he knew of. A common loon in full breeding plumage 
was diving and fioating within 20 feet of a busy causeway lined with fisher- 
men, and he or his identical twin was still there two weeks later when we 
toured the island again. Pelicans were numerous, both white and brown, 
as were the various egrets and herons. An American bittern “froze” in 
the edge of a pond in which the reeds were much too short to give him his 
customary concealment. 
We left Houston next morning and drove to Palacios, on the coast a 
