05/10/2026
Happy Mother’s Day from your family at Thunderbird!
Yesterday we filmed a flock of Wilson’s Phalaropes on one of our ponds at the Thunderbird Hunting Club. The Wilson’s Phalarope shorebird is an elegantly shorebird that has a couple of very unique behaviors. Unlike most other bird species where the males are the ones doing the courting with brightly colored feathers, it is the females that are the ones doing all the wooing in a showy tuxedo-like dress of chestnut/rusty-red neck stripes, a bold black eye-line, a bluish-gray crown, along with cinnamon or peach-colored highlights on the back and upper sides, all accented by a bleached white throat. Furthermore the “dads” become the “moms” both incubating the eggs and raising the young. Talk about a Mother’s Day Out!
A second interesting behavior in the Wilson’s Phalarope is that they feed on invertebrates by twirling around like spinning tops stirring the bottom sending their food to the surface.
Along the Texas coast shorebirds migrate through in mass in May. At Thunderbird we leave as much water on the landscape as possible for migrating shorebirds whose population numbers have dropped dramatically in recent times due to habitat loss.
