Membership Meeting
Thursday February 19, 2026 7:00 p.m.
Garden Center, Tyrrell Park, Beaumont
Birding in Africa (and beyond)
Vimal Konduri, M.D.
Dr. Konduri will present some photos of some of his favorite birds he saw during his time in Uganda, elsewhere in Africa, and in other places he visited recently.
Dr. Konduri is a pediatric resident physician who lives in Houston, Texas. He picked up birding as a hobby in early 2023 when he went on a family vacation to Assam, India, and saw lots of beautiful birds (including Indochinese rollers, slender-billed vultures, and stork-billed kingfishers), which encouraged him to explore birding sites closer to home as well. He recently spent a year in Uganda (in East Africa) for global health training, during which he was able to travel around different countries in Africa and see lots of different bird species; in total in 2025 he logged over 600 species on eBird and has continued to bird in the U.S. and abroad since returning in mid-2025. His favorite bird is the Trumpeter Swan, a commonly sighted bird in his home state of Wisconsin.
We plan to have the doors open at 6:00 p.m. The meeting will start at 7:00 p.m.
Saturday February 21, 2026. Field Trip to Jocelyn Nungaray (Anahuac) NWR. Plan to meet at the Visitor Information Station (VIS) just beyond the entrance at 8:30 a.m. There are toilets there, accessible at all times. To reach the NWR from Winnie, take Highway 124 south to FM 1985. (It is 11.0 miles from IH-10 and half a mile less from Highway 73.) Turn right (west) on FM 1985 and proceed about 11 miles to the MAIN Anahuac NWR Entrance Road on the left (to the south). As you drive along FM 1985, check any cowbird/blackbird flocks carefully for Yellow-headed Blackbirds.
The entrance to the Main Refuge is just over 3 miles down the Entrance Road. Stop along this road only where you can safely pull completely off the road. Watch along the entrance road especially near the south end for Least Grebe, Crested Caracaras and White-tailed Kites. Car- pooling will be necessary as we travel beyond the VIS. There is parking at the VIS to leave vehicles
We will visit the main unit and possibly also the Skillern Tract, looking primarily for waterfowl and other waterbirds but also raptors and sparrows.
There are usually geese and Bald Eagles on and near the refuge in winter. Shoveler Pond for years attracted large numbers of ducks. The weather over the last two years has been somewhat unusual, and it seems likely that many species, not only waterfowl, have again been late in flying south, but recent cold weather in the eastern half of the US may have persuaded them to come om south..