How to Know the Birds: No. 22, The Common Kiskadee

Without giving it too much thought, What are some of the great places in the ABA Area? Alaska and Hawaii, for starters. The Chiricahuas, the Salton Sea, and the Everglades, needless to say. Cape May and Central Park and Montrose Point, of course. But I want to make a special shoutout here to South Texas, and to the lower Rio Grande valley in particular.

What sets South Texas apart, if you ask me, is the ridiculous ease with which regional specialties are seen. Seen really well. On my first morning in Harlingen during a visit last month with the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, I stepped outside my hotel and noticed two things. First: the sights and sounds and smells of a busy commercial district at a highway interchange during the morning rush hour. Second: birds galore. A sedge wren and a pyrrhuloxia and little flocks of Inca doves; great-tailed grackles and bronzed cowbirds as far as the eye could see; a white-tailed kite sailing by and a merlin chomping on a barn swallow. And valley specialties, among them golden-fronted woodpeckers bounding across the path and chattering loudly, a Couch’s kingbird perched in plain view on a utility wire, and a low-flying flock of green parakeets barely clearing the treetops. So I was hardly surprised, although I was nevertheless greatly pleased, when I heard the ear-splitting, joyous, profane KISS-kuh-DEEEE! of Pitangus sulphuratus, the kiskadee. And this isn’t any old kiskadee, it is officially the great kiskadee.

The great kiskadee is the sort of bird that ought to be findable only by slogging through miles of rainforest to some windswept crag at the top of a mountain in the central Andes. Instead, it’s common as dirt in Harlingen and the other big cities of the lower Rio Grande valley.

On my last morning in Harlingen, I made another foray around the hotel grounds. I’d be headed home to snowy Colorado in a bit, and I needed one final fix of outlandish tropical boisterousness. Sure enough: