Rio Grande Valley

  

Altamira oriole

     When our good friends from northern NY e-mailed us to tell us they had arranged for a time-share condo in the southern Rio Grande Valley and would like us to join them, it took us all of 15 minutes to get on the phone and start making plane reservations.  This is the kind of offer birders don't think twice about, you just seize the moment and do it!  The Lower Rio Grande Valley is a mecca for birders.  You can find species here that you'll never see anywhere else in the United States of Canada.  Add to this the number of "visitors" which fly across the border and you've got the makings of one wonderful week of birding.  Our only regret was that we were only going to be in Texas for the one week.  So many locations, so many species, and so little time!  That being said, we certainly made the most of what time we had, visiting 10 great birding locales in 5 and a half days.  We brown-bagged our lunch so that we could eat on site while birding.....didn't want to miss a second of this wonderful opportunity.

Green jay

     We began on Sunday morning with a visit to Sabal Palm Grove Preserve.  This site is right on the border of the US and Mexico.  In fact, you have to pass through the infamous steel wall to get to the preserve.  One of the docents there told us that many visitors turn around at the wall thinking they are illegally crossing the border.   Well, we weren't deterred by that ominous wall and continued to the parking lot of the preserve.  At the preserve's center, a small building adjacent to the parking lot, we met Andreas, a staff biologist, docent, and student at UT in Brownsville working on his Masters in Ornithology.  He was the perfect contact to meet on our first day.  We had already received great information from several of our birding club members back in New York as to the "must see" sites in south-east Texas, but our new friend refined our search for birds and gave us further excellent advice.  What a way to start our trip.  

 The "front yard" of the office was comprised of a small patch of bare ground under the lush canopy.  Feeders and water features were present as were orange halves stuck on the limbs of the trees.  Within the first half our of our first experience in birding Texas, we had 8 "life-birds": the Altamira oriole, Green jay, Olive sparrow, Long-billed thrasher, Golden-fronted woodpecker, Buff-bellied hummingbird, Black-crested titmouse, and Great-tailed grackle.  A trip out to the "Resaca" or 0x-bow lake gave us many more birds including a new NA lifer, the Least grebe.  On the way back to our home base, we stopped at the University of Texas - Brownsville campus and added the Neotropic cormorant to our life-list as well as the Couch's kingbird.  Ten life birds on the first day was not a bad way to begin our Texas birding experience.