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Book Review: A Falcon Guide: Exploring the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail

A Falcon Guide: Exploring the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail by Mel White. Globe Pequot Press, ISBN: 0762727128, 140 pages, 6 x 9, $13.95, paper.

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Texas is a great place to escape winter, and the birds along the Rio Grande border with Mexico and the Gulf Coast are a delightful change from the familiar ones for those who live elsewhere.

The Texas Departments of Transportation and Parks and Wildlife established the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail in 2000 and provided three maps to promote its use. This slim, easy-to-handle guide is an excellent companion to the three state-produced maps.

The maps, 32 x 35 inches, with the map on one side and written descriptions of suggested sites on the other, are great, but they’re difficult to handle in a car. You really need to decide what you’re going to see with the map spread out in a motel room, take notes, and operate from the notes when in a car.

The map sites are arranged in loops. That works well if you follow the loop directions, but if you want to skip to a preferred site the directions can be difficult because some of the roads in the directions are not shown on the map.

Mel White's guide simplifies it: "Take Texas Highway 1016 south from U. S. Highway 83 in Mission about 3.3 miles; turn south on Texas Highway 494, drive past the prominent mission building on the hill, and turn right at the park entrance road."

White has selected about one-third (98 out of 308) of the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail stops for coverage in his guide. I wouldn't quarrel with his choices, based on the eight winter trips my wife and I took through the area between 1991 and 2002. I don't think White does justice to the public beach at Rockport, but then again, it's not even mentioned on the Central Texas map. We have routinely found flocks of marbled godwits, black skimmers and avocets on that beach, as well as a few long-billed curlews, willets, and various plovers and sandpipers in February. This year the beach was being replenished by bulldozers, but the flocks of skimmers, avocets, and godwits were still there, knee deep, just offshore.

White usually provides a longer list of birds possibly seen for his chosen sites than the map does, and he also provides phone numbers, e-mail and "snail-mail" addresses for each entry. The book also has the advantage of being more up to date. White notes a major change at Bentsen State Park: RVs are no longer permitted inside the park. The former camping sites are returning to nature, and future plans are to ban cars, too, and perhaps provide trams.

In addition to the preferred stops, Exploring the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail provides suggestions for bed-and-breakfasts catering to bird watchers, birding festivals, and other side trips of general interest.

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Finding Birds on the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail by Ted Lee Eubanks, Jr., Robert A. Behrstock, Seth Davidson..

A Falcon Guide: Exploring the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail by Mel White.