A Texas Limpkin Encounter
Climate change and invasive species are driving the expansion of a native bird from its historic range.
It was Saturday late afternoon before dinnertime, and my husband decided he needed to run to Dollar General to get a Monster energy drink to cure his lingering headache. Off he went and minutes later I get a phone call from him telling me about a Bird Alert. A Bird Alert is usually when we see a rare or uncommon bird in the area, something to get worked up about! We’re not birders per se, though my husband is much more in tune with birds than I am. I gravitate towards the more gregarious species and generally ignore the little brown jobbers. Yes, I know this makes me a terrible naturalist but there are so many birders in this world compared to the number of plant nerds, and well, I tend to go where there are less people and focus on things that stay put or move slowly.
This special Bird Alert was for a limpkin (Aramus guarauna), a bird that I had never seen in Texas. It was, however, a bird I was familiar with from my time living in Florida. There, the birds eat various native mussels and snails, and in recent decades have feasted on the invasive channeled and island apple snails and other exotic snail species that have found their way to Florida to breed, and escaping into the wild.
I posted my phone photos to my Instagram stories on Monday and was quite surprised to find out from Texas naturalist Matt Buckingham that there’s a bit of a limpkin invasion happening right now. Now, before I had posted to Instagram I uploaded my find onto iNaturalist, which is a platform I use with regularity and will tell any budding naturalist to start using in conjunction with field guides and other online resources. I saw on iNaturalist quite a lot of observations huddled around certain regions in Texas, plus scattered sightings throughout a wide swatch of the eastern US. But, like I said, I’m not a birder so I had not dug into the implications of these sightings.
Well, I took Matt’s information and dug in and was astounded by what I found.
First, you can see the historic limpkin range map from Cornell.
And now you can see the eBird observations from 2018-2023.
And here are all limpkin observations on iNat. If you start filtering by year on iNat you can quickly see the rapid expansion from 2021-2023, with only a handful of sightings in the Houston area in 2021 compared to 2020 when there are none in Texas, and 2023 when there are sightings all over Houston, San Antonio, Austin, DFW, scattered east Texas sightings, and a couple near South Padre and McAllen. Pretty impressive range extension within a two year time span!
I’m not going to dive too deep into apple snail ecologies here, but suffice to say, there are two species currently in Texas waterways that are becoming a problem: the island apple snail (Pomacea maculata) and the channeled apple snail (Pomacea canaliculata). They’ve primarily been found in Houston, though the San Antonio River on the Riverwalk has a substantial population and there are scattered sightings in Austin, a few near Brownsville, and one near Dallas. By far the island apple snail is the most abundant in Texas.
I know a few people who have seen apple snails in Houston but my first encounter in Texas was along the San Antonio Riverwalk. This sign was up near The Pearl but I suspect the snails are already established up and down that river in the city.
I recall that I had a passing thought when I first saw those eggs, that we needed some limpkins to fly into San Antonio and take care of the adult snails. And here we are a few years later and that whim of a thought seems to have manifested itself.
Back to my limpkin friend, I was able to inch closer to get better photos with my camera. I approached cautiously so as not to flush it further down the shore, and after a few “I saw it” photos, I slowly stepped a foot or two closer when it was distracted with opening mussels. My favorite thing about this interaction was being able to hear the limpkin opening the mussels with its beak! *Whack!*
Will I ever see another limpkin on this pond? I don’t know but I’ll keep scanning the ponds to see if they ever return.
Further Reading:
The Limpkin Explosion via The Cottonwood Post blog
Invasion of the Limpkin via Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation
A final note here, my one year anniversary on Substack was on September 20th! I wrote There is Nature in Texas as my first post, not really sure on where I was going with Substack. I’d been hesitant at first when reading about Substack, only having subscribed to several folks who used the platform via email newsletters, but it was
, whose constant raves about the platform eventually led me to join here. I’ve been writing a blog of some kind since 2002, first on Blogger, then GeoCities, then hand coding on my own website before downloading WordPress in 2009 to use on my website. I still blog, mostly trip and hike reports as well as other random things from my life. It’s a journal for myself, something I do refer to quite often to look back at, but I just happen to share it with the world, too.The goal with On Texas Nature was to work on my writing skills, to focus more narrowly on one subject, and of course to expand my audience. I recently passed 200 subscribers and hope to see those numbers to continue to grow. I certainly didn’t see myself focusing so much on Fairfield Lake State Park when I started this project—I didn’t even know what was happening at this time last year with the park. It’s been a learning curve for me as much as it has been for readers. I have no idea if I’ll ever put on the paid posts option here as I have such mixed feelings about that. It’s why I’ve never done things like Patreon—creating more content than I already do for a select audience is more than I can manage. Writing at Substack is not the only writing I do nor is it my only creative outlet.
So, here’s to another year of writing about Texas nature. I hope in the next year more of you are reading this little piece of the internet, that Fairfield Lake State Park is in the hands of the state, and that there are many more interesting nature tidbits to share with you as we learn how fascinating and diverse Texas nature can be.
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.
Limpkins are apparently showing up in our area more regularly too. I never heard of one until last year, when there was one hanging out at a nearby lake for a while. But my friend, who’s an eBird reviewer tells me that I should expect to see one at my lake eventually.
Love the article! And being somewhat of an avid birder myself, I cracked up at your “little brown jobbers” reference, I have similar feelings about the shorebird clan that I collectively refer to as “sandpipers “. They resemble each other with variations only in size, Keep up the great work!