By Matt White

Texans are normally a friendly bunch.  Even when a complete stranger asks to walk behind our house to look at a bird!   Let me explain, because a few days before Christmas this is just what I did. 

My friend Dr. Peter Barnes, a physician at the University of Texas at Tyler, agreed to accompany me to a small pond near the Smith County town of White House where earlier in the month he had found a male Vermilion Flycatcher loafing in the willows around a very small cattle pond.  I really wanted to go see it and take photographs.

Males of this species are bright red, with a dark line through the eye and are undoubtedly one of our most attractive birds.  The females are attractive, too, but muted in color.   A relative of the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, with whom it shares the habit of hawking flying insects, the Vermilion is smaller and ordinarily resides in southwest Texas.  During fall and winter, the birds occasionally disperse northward into our area where they hang out around cattle ponds or along lakeshores.  There are no records from Mount Vernon or Franklin County, but they should be looked for from about October through May.  If at all possible they should be photographed, because, they are rare birds, and, in fact, seeing them is the avian equivalent of seeing red.

When I asked Peter if he would take me there, he hesitated, saying that the bird was quite a ways from the road and wouldn’t be easy to see or photograph.  But he would take me there, but he couldn’t stay to help me find it because he had a movie date with his daughter on a rare day off.

After fighting the horrible traffic on the loop in Tyler I was beginning to question my desire to drive over two hours from home to see this little guy.  The wind was gusting strong from the southwest—and Peter had said that the bird might not come out and perch out in the open in these winds.

He led me down an oil top road past a housing development and a bunch of houses before stopping. “Why are we stopping here?” I wondered.  “This is no place for a Vermilion Flycatcher,” I thought to myself.  Peter just said to look in the trees around a pond two pastures and two fence rows distant.  “Good luck,” he said as he sped off, “let me know if you see it…” 

 So there I was—houses all around and I was standing on the side of the road looking off in the direction of a small pond with a telescope and a pair of binoculars and a huge camera lens.  A man and a women were riding a golf cart around in a yard nearby and were probably wondering what I was doing.  There were more cars zooming by than I care to remember and these folks too were surely wondering what I was up to.  But there was no bird, so disappointed and feeling sick about the whole thing I left to go eat lunch.

Returning about an hour later, I noticed a small flash of red in a willow about 200 yards distant.  “Wow that really stands out,” I thought.  But Peter was right.  I wasn’t going to be able to get close enough to get photos.  Unless…  Unless, I ask those people in the golf cart for permission to walk out there.

As I was saying, we Texans are normally a friendly bunch.  They were more than happy to grant permission to a complete stranger to go birding in their backyard for a few minutes.   I was able to walk right up under the bird and click away.  I drove home thinking what a nice Christmas present.