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Come for the Birding, Find Everything Else
The hunt for the snail kite was my first birding adventure
“If you come for the birding, you’ll find everything else.”
That’s what my avian-loving friend told me towards the end of my first official excursion, and she couldn’t have been more right.
The day had started with a white whale, or to be exact, the snail kite, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I had long heard about my friend’s birding adventures and was looking for an activity to calm my mind and escape the depressing news cycle for a day.
So at the beginning of the week, I threw out the idea for an excursion, and in a few short hours, it was on the calendar to go see a burrowing owl in Galveston. But then things changed. She had intel about a snail kite that had been spotted hanging out in Sugar Land, a suburb of Houston.
What is a snail kite, you may ask, and why was there a Captain Ahab-like devotion to seek it? My friend explained on the drive down there.
The snail kite is a South American species that has previously only been seen in South Florida. This raptor eats apple snails, also native to South America. But, since someone in Texas at some point dumped their aquarium into a…
