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Rarely Seen Cuckoo Spotted in Birding Competition 

Excitement spread through the birding community when Parker Allie, a participant in the 27th Great Texas Birding Classic, sighted the first mangrove cuckoo in Galveston County since 1982.

Allie lives in Fort Worth but drove out to Galveston as part of the Statewide Big Day for his construction company’s birding team, the ST Birders. The team’s plan was to cover as many habitats across Texas as possible. Before spotting the elusive mangrove cuckoo, Allie already had a long and successful day. He started at 6 a.m. at High Island, worked his way down the Bolivar Peninsula and then took a ferry to Galveston State Park. Finally, he trekked over to East End Lagoon Nature Preserve with hopes of seeing a black skimmer. He arrived around 4 p.m., and quickly realized that the water, granola bars and beef sticks he packed to sustain him throughout the day were not cutting it.

“I cannot wait to eat,” he thought as he hiked the nature preserve trail. The path is a large loop, with two places to cut across and shorten the walk. When Allie came up to a fork in the trail, he considered calling it a day and turning down the route back to his car. He had already contributed 107 species of birds to his team, and his mind was fixed on the red snapper and shrimp he craved from a restaurant in town. He eventually decided to finish out the loop before retiring for the day.

While walking, he accidentally flushed a gray and yellow bird out of a tree. Allie got out his camera and followed the bird, snapping multiple pictures.

“I immediately thought it was a yellow-billed cuckoo and I was excited,” he says. “We didn’t have one of those today, and I’d never seen one.”

Yellow-billed cuckoos have a white belly and are found throughout much of the eastern and central U.S. On the other hand, mangrove cuckoos have an orangish buff belly and a black “mask” around their eyes, and venture into Texas only accidentally. They reside along the coast of southern Florida, Mexico and Central America. As the name suggests, these birds can be found in mangrove swamps, but they also live in lowland scrub or woodland habitats.

Allie marked the bird as a yellow-billed cuckoo on the eBird app, then left to get dinner.

“I didn’t know what I had until later,” he says. “I’m a novice guy that had dumb luck.”

Later that night, Allie went through his pictures and noticed that the bird he saw more closely resembled a mangrove cuckoo. Not recognizing the novelty, he simply updated his eBird list, uploaded the pictures, and went to bed.

It was not until the next night, after he arrived home in Fort Worth, that he noticed the commotion his eBird post sparked. He went to review his checklist from the East End Lagoon Nature Preserve and saw dozens more reports of the mangrove cuckoo, many of them crediting him for finding it first.

“I couldn’t believe it all, and still can’t,” Allie says.

Allie still considers himself a birding beginner. His interest developed during the pandemic when looking for hobbies to do with his wife, Amy, who was pregnant with their first child at the time. His boss at Scott Tucker Construction Company introduced him to eBird, and they later learned about the Great Texas Birding Classic in a TPWD email. They first competed in 2021, and this year the company had three teams.

Allie says he is thankful he put the pictures on eBird, so that many more people could spot a lifer before the bird left Galveston.