2021 Michigan Trip - Ozark National Forest, Texas, and Missouri

The first actual birding stop on the way back home from Michigan was a combination of three locations, one in Western Missouri near Kansas City, one in the Ozarks of West Arkansas, and one in Northwest Texas on the way to Colorado. While the stops in Texas and Missouri weren’t so severe and were mainly just to look at the local wildlife, the birding area in the Ozarks was for a few species on the brink of endangerment. However, we also got a lot more ticks. My Dad seemed to be the magnet for them, as he got all the ticks in the Southeast. We were unable to determine all the tick species, but one of them was the Lone Star Tick (Amblyomma americanum), which apparently doesn’t carry Lyme Disease but is a host to a plethora of other nasty illnesses. None of us got bitten by ticks, though mosquitos were definitely a problem (I counted up 25 mosquito bites on myself alone).

For most of the trip, flycatchers were pretty sporadic. However, in Missouri, they were everywhere. This particular one is an Eastern Wood-pewee (Contopus virens), the most common of the Eastern flycatchers we saw. Back home in the West, we have Western Wood-pewee (Contopus sordidulus). The two of them are basically identical in appearance, but they sound quite a bit different.

Great Crested Flycatchers (Myiarchus crinitus) were in low number along our route. They are the only Myiarchus flycatcher that lives in the Eastern portion of the US, so this makes some sense. Back in San Francisco, we have Ash-throated Flåycatchers (Myiarchus cinerascens) instead.

One of the target birds of our trip was the Red-cockaded Woodpecker (Leuconotopicus borealis), seen here at a tree it has made a lot of holes in. They were nesting along the road we were birding, and there were plenty of them flying around the forest. This species lives strictly in open pine woodlands and is relatively rare. It is also one of the species that are at threat of being endangered. Most of the time, you can’t see any red on this bird, despite the name, but this particular individual had the red cockade visible.

This band and spray paint was on the tree of one of the Red-cockaded Woodpecker nests. The metal band prevents snakes from climbing up the tree and eating the young woodpeckers, while the spray paint tells loggers not to cut this tree. I got the opportunity to talk to one of the locals, a retired paper engineer, and he was the one who told us to look out for things like these. He’d lived in Arkansas and was born near one of the towns that one of the early paper companies made. He said, sometime shortly before or after Georgia Pacific (later acquired by the Koch Brothers in 2005) purchased it, the paper companies and through a series of decisions ended up killing most of their hardwood forests by sending people to girdle and poison the trees (they had a lot more hardwood than pine). The reason for this was that the hardwood trees wouldn’t grow as fast as pine, and they wanted to plant lots of pine to make more money (according to him, it would take three generations of pine trees to grow one hardwood). Also, the pines they could harvest grew on the slopes of mountains, making logging them difficult, so planting pines in the lowlands would save them transportation costs and difficulties. However, to make paper, they had to have a mixture that was ~70% hardwood and the rest pine, but they had so much hardwood, so they didn’t see a problem with removing large amounts of it and replacing it with pine. The funny thing was that even though they were killing the hardwood forests, they weren’t actually using the trees, they just let the dead trees rot and decay. They thought someone would eventually come up with a new mixture to make paper that would require mostly pine when they inevitably ran out of hardwood. Nobody did. So, the National Forest Service started logging Ozark National Forest to sell timber to the paper companies. But, when the logging companies had been planting and logging all the pines, they mainly replanted the ground with Loblolly (Pinus taeda) and Slash Pine (Pinus elliottii), instead of Longleaf Pine (Pinus palustris), which is the type of pine Red-cockaded Woodpecker lives in and are also listed as endangered. As a result, the Red-cockaded Woodpeckers are very scarce across the Southeast and critical bird habitat in Ozark National Forest is being logged by paper companies allowed by the US Forest Service.

Although this female Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea) is drab, the males are an all-blue aquamarine-like color. Personally, I prefer Lazuli Buntings (Passerina amoena), but Indigo Buntings are fine too. These two buntings are Western and Eastern counterparts of each other, with Indigo Bunting being the latter.

This Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica) was a young one, probably not long out of the nest by the color of the gape. The gape is basically the lip of the bird’s mouth at the areas where the beak doesn’t exist. This bird has a slightly yellowish one, indicative of a young bird. Almost every, if not all, young birds of all species have this feature.

Here is a photo of that bird’s sibling sitting on a lower branch.

This warbler was probably the hardest to see out of all the birds we chased in the Southeast. Cerulean Warblers (Setophaga cerulea) are sky-blue warblers of the canopy of mature deciduous forest, although this heavily backlit photo doesn’t really do the bird justice. The reason for this highly backlit photo was because the bird was flying all over the place and at the very tops of broad-leafed trees, making photography and finding it very difficult. This species is in decline because its wintering range in the Andes is being deforested in favor of growing crops. We only saw one of these beautiful warblers up in the Ozarks, though there were plenty of other ones like Hooded Warbler (Setophaga citrina), Prairie Warbler (Setophaga discolor), and Ovenbird (Seiurus aurocapilla).

The US has many species of chickadee, but each place in America typically only has two of them max. This place in Texas only had one, Carolina Chickadee (Poecile carolinensis). This is the Southern counterpart of Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus), but both species are limited to the Eastern side of the US, with Mountain (Poecile gambeli) taking hold in the Rockies and Chestnut-backed (Poecile rufescens) on the West Coast.

By far, the most colorful bunting is Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris), and we saw one of these beautiful birds in Texas. This bird lives mainly in Texas, Oklahoma, and a bit in some of the Southeast. The species seems almost too colorful like someone dipped the bird in a rainbow but added a few colors to make a bird that feels like the taste of an overly rich meal. However, it’s still a good bird to look at, at least compared to some sparrows.