For the past two weeks I've been birding in south and southeastern Texas. Eight of us spent 13 nights in 10 motels, drove a couple of thousand miles in a pair of Dodge Caravans, ate too many meals in restaurants, and saw more than 200 species of birds. I'll have an exact count when the trip organizer, former Minnesotan Mike Mulligan, sends his official trip list. Mike lives in Calgary. Five of his six guests are Canadians. Our guide was Kevin Easely of the travel company Costa Rica Gateway, known to Mike for his many Costa Rican trips, and well acquainted with Texas birds.

A trip like this really is more about travel and endurance -- at least for me -- than it is about birds. We all flew to Houston to begin. We birded east of Houston, then down the coast to Padre Island, then south into the Rio Grande Valley, then back to Houston via San Antonio, then east to the town of Winnie and the famous migrant fall-out site known as High Island. The idea is that migrant birds finishing their trans-Gulf of Mexico trip hit shore exhausted, filling trees for the pleasure of we birders. Sometimes that happens. This time, strong winds blowing north off the Gulf carried any bird with an ounce of sense as far inland as possibe. High Island and most of the other migrant traps we visited were pretty much dead. That doesn't mean we had bad birding, just that very good birding could have been better.

Mike had built a tight schedule. it got bent a bit when we took an hour to visit the Alamo in San Antonio. That followed a two-hour delay in the town of Hondo when I checked myself into the emergency ward of the Hondo hospital so a doctor could look at the torn hamstring in my right leg. Three days before I had stepped over a log in a wooded garden where I was stalking a Chuck-will's-widow. I put my foot on a smaller log I didnt see. It rolled away, pulling my foot with it. I did the splits, something I can't do. Ice the leg, Dr. Randall said, stay off it, keep it higher than your heart. Good advice, but it was obvious he had never been on a serious birding trip by car. My toes are still blackish, but I will bird again.

My goal was to photograph bird species I had not previously photographed. I was happy with the result. I brought 2,869 images home with me. I've culled that by about two-thirds, and now will begin working to see which of those I actually keep. The best photos were of Karen Thompson, president of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, who was at the Alamo for part of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of that battle, and of the millions of bats we watched exit cave near Uvalde, Texas. More about those later. I probably won't take another two-week auto tour of Texas, but I'd go back in a minute to watch those bats again. Ms. Thompson might sound like a strange choice for best photo from a birding trip. Not at all. I'll post a photo later.