The Gulf Coast in early May is a place where two migrations meet. The trans-Gulf migrants are coming off the water, having flown across the entire Gulf of Mexico in a single night, and the shorebirds along the beach are passing through on their way to the Arctic. For three or four days in the right week of early May, the species turnover at the right barrier island is one of the densest birding experiences in North America.

I went last week for three nights. The hotel was a small bed-and-breakfast inn a few blocks back from the beach in a Mississippi town that has been a tourist destination, in various ways, for more than a century. The town has casinos. It has had casinos since the early 1990s, when state law allowed dockside gambling, and the casinos are visible from the inn in two directions, with their pastel facades and parking structures arranged along the waterfront. The inn itself is older than the casinos by half a century and has nothing to do with them. The two industries coexist, the way most things on this coast coexist, by not paying much attention to each other.

Where the Trans-Gulf Migration Lands

The birding is east and west of the casinos, not at them, and the birds are the entire reason to come. Cerulean warblers, which I see in the upper Midwest maybe once every three years, can be in the oaks of the coastal hammocks the first week of May. Hooded warblers, prothonotaries, redstarts, scarlet tanagers, indigo buntings, summer tanagers, all of them coming in off the water, landing exhausted in the first trees they can find, and feeding for a few hours before continuing inland. The trans-Gulf flight is one of the wonders of the migration year, and the consequence of it at the right time at the right point on the coast is birds in numbers you would not see in any other context.

The shorebirds are the other half of the trip. The beach at the right tide has black-bellied plovers, semipalmated plovers, sanderlings, dunlin in their breeding red, ruddy turnstones, and the long, awkward profile of a marbled godwit if you are lucky. The barrier islands offshore, accessible by boat, hold larger numbers and rarer species. I did not go offshore on this trip but I have on previous trips, and the islands are worth a day if you have one to give.

Shorebirds on the Barrier Beaches

The town itself is small and walkable in the strip nearest the water. I ate dinner one night at a fish place with screen porches and a chalkboard menu, where everything came from boats that had been in that morning. I ate dinner another night at a Vietnamese restaurant in a strip mall a mile inland, run by a family who had been on the coast since the 1970s, and the soup was as good as any I have had outside of a major city. The cultural layers of the Mississippi coast are deeper than the casino strip suggests, and you find them by getting off the main road and asking the right people where to go.

I did not go into a casino on this trip. I drove past several of them, and at night the glow from their facades was strong enough to read by from the porch of the inn, but the activity I came for was happening in the oaks at sunrise and on the beach at midmorning, and the rest of the time I was either eating or asleep. A trip like this works the way it works because the casinos are not the destination. They are part of the visible landscape, the way a refinery or a port is part of the landscape, and you take them or leave them according to your interest. Timing for the trans-Gulf wave is the most important variable.

A Coast With Cultural Layers

The species count for the three days was longer than the list I usually keep for a full spring at home, and the trip ended the way the best ones do, which is with me already thinking about when to come back.