Howdy folks. In the days between the end of the haunt event and the fast approaching ultra-race, I’ve been doing my best to get a few body nags healed up and hopefully not add any new dings to pile. Last year I managed to injure my back putting all the decorations back right before the race. Lesson learned, I took the effort to get everything out of the valley and into the out building and left it to hang out there until post run. The run is hard enough as it is without piling on additional difficulty. With all the extra rest I’ve been able to get a lot of miscellaneous to-dos checked off starting with the bird counts. Updated both the Average Year stats (link here) and the life list. AY sits at 307 (two finds still have to be added to our tracking list) and as you will see on the left nav bar my lifelist is now at 432 (it may look like 430, but it is really 432 thanks to a couple of late adds ha). And one of those late adds and missing tracking species in our AY spreadsheet happens to be today’s featured feathered friend.
Hit the jump to find out more about this lost barnyard resident.
In addition to all the other organization (read non-physical) related accomplishments this week, I was able to get all the directories and galleries set up to finally start processing the 2024 tins. I know, I know, I’m waaay behind as usual – this retirement life is damn hectic hehehe. The main point is I can start processing and releasing more current finds like this yellow beauty here.
This member of the Tyrannidae family is the only member of its genus Machetornis which stands for “fighter bird” in Ancient Greek (link here). Its given Latin species name, Rixosa, is ‘quarrelsome’ which implies this bird is the Honey Badger of the birding world (link here – if you don’t laugh at that video you are dead inside or beaten numb by political pundits this late in the election cycle!). The reddish hue in their eye fits the supposed aggressive disposition of this Flycatcher, but that aggressive Latin naming really doesn’t translate well into its more common name, the Cattle Tyrant.
In my research (Cornell, Wikipedia, etc.) I did find that their name is “a reference to its pugnacious [behavior] and habit of dispossessing other species of their nests”. For the record, I did have to look up the word pugnacious and now have to use it in three more sentences before the end of day – let’s hope Linda thinks it means something nice ha (link here).
Now for the really interesting part of the story. You will not find this entry in the standard Cornell birding site – also the reason it is not in our Average Year tracking spreadsheet. The mystery lies in the fact it is not a North American bird, rather a visitor from South America. The Cattle Tyrant calls home the most northern countries in the south (Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador) and then a large swath through Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina. Let’s just say not normally found in downtown Corpus Christi where this wayward specimen was located.
Back in December 2023, reports started coming out of south Texas regarding a rarity that had shown up in Corpus Christi. At first I did not pay much attention to it as we had already committed to switching our usual snowbirding destination from Texas to Arizona. News continued to build and after tracking down some additional reports, found out this was the first time this species had been spotted in the US (link here). Like the Bat Falcon (link here), the birding community was very excited and birders across the country were flocking down to get a view. Figured there was no way this rarity was going to remain there until we made our way back from Arizona and put it out of mind.
As you can tell, that was an incorrect assessment. After a rather forgettable January in Arizona, we decided to make a spring run back to Texas. A quick check of the eBird reports brought a complete surprise as it was STILL hanging out in downtown Corpus Christi. Made a note as that city is always in our Texas adventures. Oftentimes more of a pass through to get to Port Aransas or South Padre Island depending on our direction of travel. In our stops leading up to that area, we were meeting fellow birders who relayed that the Cattle Tyrant was still there and “was the easiest rarity check they had ever had” due to its rather localized residency.
We were repeatedly told to find the “blue trash bin” at the heart of downtown Christi. That ended up being a bit more difficult than expected as we had to navigate a series of one-ways and quite frankly, there looked to be more than one blue trash bin in the area. Eventually we found ourselves at the back of an oyster restaurant (if I remember correctly, it was called Water Street Oyster Bar). There was indeed a large blue trash bin behind the restaurant in front of their parking lot. Did a quick scan of the area but unable to spot any yellow Flycatcher specimens. There was an individual (likely one of their cooks) taking a break near the bin. Decided to talk up the local, assuredly, with the flurry of activity he would have some info on its whereabouts.
Me: “Do you happen to know where the rare Cattle Tyrant bird has been spotted around here?”
Him “No”
Me: “Oh, we were told there were lot of people coming down to this area to take a picture of a bird next to a blue trash bin” {as I was pointing to the blue trash bin he was a mere 6 feet from}
Him “Nope”
Either he was new to the job, completely oblivious to activities around him or possibly feeling pugnacious (2 sentences to go) towards me, regardless, this was a fruitless path to continue. Made a few more laps around the parking lot to see if there was anyone else to ask and to check if there were other bins in the area. Eventually went back to the car and reported the bad news to Linda.
Now, my wife is a woman of many talents, but she has a definite super power when it comes to finding rarities based on minimal information. Her gift lies in her ability to triangulate off of relative little information obtained from bits and scraps buried in individual eBird reports. More amazing is her knack for taking images and getting us to that exact spot. She immediately brought up a list of sources and went to work. After a couple traversals down the downtown streets she had brought us to the exact spot where two of the sighting pictures had been made thanks to a couple of murals painted on the buildings and a match on some architectural specifics on the side of the building. Note, were only one block away from our original stop.
Unfortunately, there was no angry yellow Flycatcher to be seen. She even found another blue trash bin. Continued searching that square block, but no luck. We were also expecting to see at least a couple of other birders on the hunt as well that might help on the search. Nobody fit the birder profile, although Linda did locate a successful eBird report from earlier that day. Confirmation it was still there. On one of our loops we had passed the original blue trash bin and there was a nagging notion that there was a yellowish bird barely visible from our roadside angle. As a last ditch effort, had Linda take me back there. “THERE IT IS!!” A Robinish sized yellow bird standing on the edge of the famous blue trash bin looking in all directions for dinner.
Quite brilliant from a bird perspective as these Flycatchers like well .. Flies. Nothing draws Flies better than a pile of restaurant trash! There was still a steep angle from the street which made it difficult to get full bodied shots, but there was no doubt we had found our South American visitor. Also became apparent as to why our rarity was still hanging around – basically catered food two times a day.
I had to chuckle when I saw this next shot while in the digital darkroom.
“Hey idiot employee, the next time someone asks you where I’m at, tell them I am RIGHT HERE and point to this blue trash bin 6 feet away!!!!!”
As some additional background before I let you go, the Cattle Tyrant does have a relationship to their namesake as they will follow behind or catch a ride on the backs of Cattle for extended periods in order to vacuum up any disturbed prey. Very similar behavior as seen in our more common US resident the Cattle Egret (link here). I wonder if I could convince one of these birds to ride on my shoulder during the summer runs to keep those devil spawn Horse Flies off me…note to self, place an add in the Flycatcher want ads. They are very similar to the Tropical/Couch’s Kingbirds that are pervasive in South Texas. Without a specific reason to include this South American resident, I would always opt for those local Kingbirds first – those two pose enough of a headache distinguishing much less throwing in this third out-of-towner.
Although not a very good tin, I decided to include this next shot from an ID perspective. You will notice that the yellow coloring on the neck/breast continues all the way up the underwing which is a nice characteristic of many of the yellow sporting Flycatchers – you do not see that angle very often in reference shots on the web.
In closing, did check on eBird to see if this specimen was still hanging around. From what I can tell, it has moved on as the most recent checklist and photos I could find were from May of this year. A definite nice add to my life list. Can’t wait to see what will show up when we head back to Texas this January.
Now I need to go try out my new word!
Wildlife Intrigued 
Lovely golden hue on the vest! Greaat captures!! 😊
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you! It does have a stunning hue and although not the most appealing settings (a trash bin), the blue coloring does help to make the feather coloring pop even more. As always, appreciate you stopping in and joining the conversation.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Looks like a mild-mannered bird. Looks are deceiving—beautiful photos of the little yellow Cattle Tyrant.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Reminds me of the Blue Jay – pretty from afar, but talk about a pugnacious bird up close ha! To its credit, it was quite accommodating of our intrusion in its trash vacuuming. As they say, a full belly bird is a happy bird. (disclaimer, I actually just made that up hehehehe). Official haunt day is approaching, you better keep a eye on your skeleton staff.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Your saying is true, however.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Fortunately for me, there is no way to disprove the saying .. or Linda’s less than flattering opinions of Snakes!
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s probably a good thing she doesn’t know snakes’ opinions of her.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, I agree. They were probably initially, oh look at the nice lady, let’s go help her get across the street, then end up getting shrieked at and chased by a garden hoe wielding crazy lunatic woman. Now their like “Let’s climb up the roof and jump down into her open topped Jeep when she least expects it”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t think snakes hold grudges, but you never know. Crows and Ravens hold grudges from generations, so tell Linda to be nice to crows and ravens.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ll let her know about the Snakes, but I am pretty convinced she is not going to believe a thing I say about them that is anyway positive. So far she has been pretty good with the Crows in the yard and we don’t have to deal with Ravens unless we make it out to Vegas so she should be good there.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Glad your ‘twitch’ ended in success, must have been frustrating with no reasonable person to ask. Sometimes it’s like a needle in a haystack. Keep an eye on my spot, got a nice little tale coming up when I hit the digital darkroom.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks B.! Admittedly, our twitch efforts do not always end this well. Not sure what was up with the individual I inquired – maybe annoyed with all the influx of people into that area (which would be odd as he worked at a restaurant and more people means more plates), really clueless about his surroundings or maybe he was just having a really bad day. We come upon all types in our wanderings and try not to linger on the bad experiences. Will definitely keep an eye out for your latest finds – have to take a short break to test my body limits, but will be back early next week (hopefully). Take care and let me know if Brad or Jan show up in any of your local newspapers.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hopefully B & J behave over here and don’t get involved with the twitching brigade, they could bring home some bad attitude!
Yes your experience with the restaurant worker is odd but guess you’re right he was having a bad hair day or something. Never mind you got your lifer.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You are right, I did get my lifer, all side issues matter none. Hoping Brad and Jan were able to stay out of the twitching fray, although I did tell them I wanted them to bring back a Pink-Footed Goose based on another comment you made. There was some push back regarding it being too far away, but I’m holding their annual bonus until they show up with one ha!
LikeLike
Pugnacious but, cute.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I see what you did there Vic! Now you just need two more uses of that word to complete the process – unless you already knew that word in which case I bow to your dictionary skills ha. Thanks for coming by and still saddened by your blogging frustrations.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I am very familiar with that word…daily basis. I live with someone that should be the poster child of the definition.
WP engineers have bloated the programming with code that breaks, constantly. MORE is not always better…the law of diminishing returns. I am NOT coughing up $300 for a plug-in, just so I can adjust my legacy theme without the damn block crap. Oh. Sure. You can get functionality, maybe…but, what was once a normal function is now an add-on. “We know you don’t like the block editor but, you can pay us extra to make it go away.” Yeah. No. GFY.
LikeLiked by 1 person
hahahaha, well good to know we are getting good use of the word!
I am forever frustrated by “new” features absolutely destroying my productivity. I used to be able to get my look and feel out of the box with a free theme, then they updated the themed and I had to go into the theme code to add back in the features, then that broke the same time they added blocks, but I could use the classic editor, then than went away and now it takes me at least twice as long to get my posts out having to add my custom code in, WP detects I messed with it and prompts me per image if I want to turn it back to a classic block which is $#@%@#$E^@^ I wanted in the first place. Don’t get me started on the changes photoshop has made recently that basically destroyed all my actions because they inserted prompts I don’t give a crap about in the midst of my captured steps. I can definitely see where you are at. One day I’ll give up, but for now I am fighting through.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good god. So…they continue to screw things up. More is not always better. I guess the only thing left is to download WP.org & self host. I considered that a few years ago but, didn’t realize how out of control WP.com has become. Now, I am too old to care. Might look into Substack…and I post stuff on X.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yep. By the way, think I mentioned this before, but I used to run my own instance from WP.org hosted on Go Daddy. That was going great until Firefox and Chrome decided that my certs were not verified and started putting up browser alerts indicating my website was “unsafe”. Went to get official certs from Go Daddy and they wanted $400/year additional for those – that wasn’t going to happen and I wouldn’t expect my readers to continue to come if the browser was sending up flares and air raid sirens every time they went to read a post. That is what pushed me to switch to the service option.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You did indeed tell me about that. I despise Chrome, tho I use Brave, which is a Chrome clone (on my phone & laptop). I also use Firefox & other Mozilla clones. I like Pale Moon & I miss Netscape.
I never liked Go Daddy. Read/heard too many bad things about it.
I miss the simplicity from years ago.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have a definite fondness for Netscape – I was responsible for our custom corporate deployment at my former place of employment. Still have the stuffed dragon they gave me when we attended their Netscape Conference in San Francisco so many year ago. I think my brother use Brave, I need to look into that a bit more – right now I am just running the Duck Duck Go add on to Firefox.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I used to work in law enforcement (non-sworn) & the Netscape folks came to our department (NCDOT) & crafted a specific version of Netscape with a spinning DOT symbol. DOT was our parent but, we were Division of Motor Vehicles. We were housed with Driver’s License & NC State Troopers. Our unit ran weigh stations, salvage vehicles & emissions standards, set up by California. I used to sell inspection stickers to dealerships. I was their secretary & kept all the files. 1992-2001. I had forgotten about the Netscape dragon!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I got in on my employer’s first partnership with NCSA (at my Alma Mater) and were early adopters of this thing called the World Wide Web and URLs that they were pioneering with Berners-Lee (CERN) and Andreessen (UofI) – of course beginning with Mosaic and its predecessors. We were doing a lot of solid modeling and general heavy compute analysis using NCSA’s supercomputer at the time – that relationship carried on well into my career and even closer when I moved out of the engineering design group into the brand new INET (Internet Technology Group) – the first formal organization at my employer tasked with figuring out how to leverage this new technology. Had to spend a lot of time out in San Francisco at the various Netscape and Java conferences. Amazing how far that area has evolved since those early 90s!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wow. You were ground level. The most I did was programming on Apple IIs in my senior year of HS & moving to the punchcard machines in college, freshman year…community college. Got aggravated with some professors, changed my degree, left in my sophomore year & went to work. Most places were using mainframes back then. I never got a degree.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It has been proven to me year over year that paper degrees do not always translate to quality of person or work – I am pretty much on the Mike Rowe bandwagon these days. Of special note is the Java Certifications they used to give to demonstrate mastery of the language and concepts. I interviewed countless individuals with that on their resume to quickly find out they didn’t know a damn thing about it. It got so bad we actually considered that a negative on your resume if we saw it. I was fortunate I missed both the ticker tapes and the punch card years both in school and at work. Oddly enough, never had mainframe coding until I was put in a class for the first 3 months of employment – at the time, their business was at least 90-95 mainframe based. My direct boss thought it would be good for his tech language hires to know COBOL as well. Wow was that frustrating, but the good news is that is how I met Linda as she would help me translate to that platform. More than once I was called out (in front of the class) for complaining about having to write a program (JCL) just to to run a program (COBOL). Once out of the class I got to go back into the engineering realm where they were at least using Fortran.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Did a little Fortran. Don’t remember it. VTOC with COBOL made me nuts. RPG was fun, from what I remember & I enjoyed Assembler. I was 17/18. The punchcard machine made many curse. The compiler made MORE curse. The department had two monitors connected to the mainframe, called CANDE. I never knew what that stood for, nor did I ever use them.
I never did Java but, dabbled in Javascript. That was my later years when an HTML programmmer. Did CSS, too. Never did C or C++. Did you ever get into all the Microsoft tests? I had an ex hubby that went thru that labyrinth. 🙄
LikeLiked by 1 person
I was lucky enough to have some very seasoned employees take me under their wing when I first started that I owe tremendously for the successes in my career. To this day I remember the first program I wrote soon after getting my first assignment out of our 3 month training course. Spent like a week on it, probably one of the most elegant programs I have ever written to this day. Read telemetry data coming from a data analysis van that was tethered to one of our large machines at our proving grounds. Long story short, turned my program over to my team lead for inspection, beaming with pride. He looked at it for about a minute and threw it in the garbage – “Quality programming, now you need to transition from academic coding to real world production expected here”. From that moment on I took in a fire hose of information on concise, fault tolerant, extendable, performance based programming that all 400 level collegiate IT related classes need to be replaced with. In the engineering side we were not Microsoft based, so I didn’t pursue any of those certifications. We were initially based on VAX/UNIX/FORTRAN77 and enough COBOL to get our data moved up to the corporate mainframes which was at the heart of our business computing – Linda worked on that engineering to mainframe interface (just a section over from me). Some stressful days and nights for sure and I enjoyed every second of it. Then the career progresses and unfortunately had to transition out of those roles into some areas that were not enjoyable at all. Assuredly the same story everyone in the business goes through. Somewhere along that trajectory I met Brad (I believe he worked with Linda first before our paths crossed in the enterprise architecture) so there were still lots of bright spots ha!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wow. Y’all go WAY back. Did you pull out any hair? Invent curse words? I did.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I blame my premature greying on those early years and my sarcastic outlook on life to my final years. The good thing about programming is I find there are very few real spirits in the machine. Sure, there are a few there which will make your life an absolute living hell especially if sporadic (and unfortunately those tend to be), but all the rest of the unexpected behavior can be walked back to an error you made. My mantra was and always has been, if I can just create a consistent scenario that causes it, I can fix it. I spent a lot years being called back in to solve code problems – it became very evident that the college curriculums were cutting out debugging skills from their requirements. There was also an overwhelming opinion that came with that based on it being the fault of everything but their own code. In reality I wanted to pull their hair out ha.
LikeLike
They stopped debugging training??? Good god. That would be garbage in, garbage out, 24/7. Yikes.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Speaking to the choir!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Have mercy…
LikeLiked by 1 person
I used to be in charge of Quality Assurance for Java based systems and would be called in to resolve system errors in production. Absolutely hated that role (side work from all the architecture responsibilities). Holy cow did I see some absolutely awful code and I’d ask what the developer did to track down an error and they would look at me dumbfounded – I should preface that with almost all of the systems people (at least in the engineering world) were rock solid, but there was some bad hires and way to much crap coded coming from outsourcing. My favorite example is a contractor got chewed out for not using defines for hard parameters, programming 101 stuff. On his next review I see this…
#define ONE 1
#define TWO 2
:
#define TWENTY 20
later in code
if (var==TWENTY) {
:
}
I ripped his program printout in half in front of him and immediately called his supervisor to get rid of him.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ah, geez… Outsourcing = cheaper hires. Top notch code heads make the big bucks. Not everyone can afford…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh the debates we used to have ugh… outsourcing had a cheaper initial product, but no one wanted to figure out the cost of maintaining it once they bolted for another job or contract so TCO could never be adequately assessed. Smile and wave boys, smile and wave.
LikeLike
I love the idea of a bird being pugnacious! Maybe he can somehow avoid extinction! He’s a beauty too. I have been seeing unusual yellow-breasted birds in our yard this year, but different from this guy. There are animals migrating to Northern AZ from the valley, presumably due to the heat. So maybe the flycatcher is thinking along the same lines?? ☀️
LikeLiked by 1 person
See, the word is catching on! We’ll see if this Tyrant shows up again this year. From the lack of reports I could find it looks like it took off around May. The thing about rarities is unless they find some mate (or equivalent substitute) they are not going to stick around much beyond the breeding seasons. If it ended up liking that particular area it might show back up and bring another one with it to enjoy delicacies of the blue trash bin. Appreciate you stopping in Lisa!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Do you suppose it gave the oyster joint a 5-star rating?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I suspect it definitely got a 5 star rating, but that may work in reverse when it comes to a Tyrant recommendation – they tend to like the not-so-fresh end of the scale ha. ….although when it comes to Oysters, I would be offended if it they were fresh – yuck.
LikeLike
Colorful bird. Is it coincidence a bird of another name has similar nest robbing behaviors? (aka. Cowbird)
LikeLiked by 1 person
You mean the name that shall never be spoken in my presence?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yup, that one.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ha!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have no words for the Honey Badger video – astonishing! This guy’s brilliant color is wonderful – and maybe he will come back next year for more trash bin goodies!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Please tell me you have seen the Honey Badger video before now. That video absolutely cracks me up whenever I watch it and I”m sure the staff at Intrigued HQ are absolutely tired of me quoting it all the time. I sure hope it comes back next year and hopefully brings a mate so it could stay a little longer. I usually have to work a LOT harder to get the rarities coming up from South America (think Bat Falcon), but once Linda triangulated from the online images to confirm we were in the right area it came down to just picking which of the blue trash bins was the selected take out. Nice change from crawling around in the Texas muck ha. Thanks for dropping in Sam – trying to get through the to-do list that built up prepping and then recovering from the race so I start getting caught up on everyone’s posts.
LikeLike
Congratulations on this out-of-the-way life bird, Brian. It’s remarkable how long it hung around but understandable, based on the availability of food.
Your photos are marvelous and show all the bird’s field marks. Like all flycatchers, this individual is very elegant!
I’m trying to visualize you showing up with a flycatcher on your shoulder to your ultra races. That would give you quite a reputation, but likely not one for being pugnacious. 😊👊
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you Tanja! As far as places to get lost in, this one definitely found a good place – carry out meals every day ha. I would have liked to been able to give you a couple more angles, but my position from the street was making it difficult to reach over the lip of the bin. I also tried to get some in-flight shots as it would launch off to snag a Fly – that proved incredibly difficult and the shots I did take ended up being a blurry mess. Oh well, something to shoot for when it comes back. You are probably right, I really don’t need to draw any more attention to myself, my ambulance misfortunes are well known in the local ultra community – as much as that brings a good chuckle showing up with a bird companion would have them rolling on the trail hehehe. Thanks for dropping in Tanja, as always, really appreciate it.
LikeLiked by 1 person