The best little bird towns in Texas
Rodriguez's eyes shine and his usual rapid-fire speech revs into machine-gun gear as he gets going about the nearly 500 species of birds that have been found in a narrow swath of land in Texas that follows the Rio Grande along the Mexican border.
"This place is lousy with birds," he declares as we canoe down the river. He is not exaggerating. In less than two hours, we see 42 species: snowy egrets, great egrets, cattle egrets. Tricolored herons, great blue herons, little blue herons, green herons. Harris' hawks, Swainson's hawks, broad-winged hawks, Cooper's hawks, gray hawks.
Rodriguez, who leads these canoe trips for the nonprofit Friends of the Wildlife Corridor, is supposed to be steering the canoe, but he's finding it difficult to keep both hands on the paddle while pointing out the scores of birds that are swooping, soaring, diving, calling as they fight for territory and show off for potential mates. Swimming garter snakes and giant breaching yellow carp try to steal the show, but they've got nothing on the small green kingfisher that plunges off an overhanging branch, grabs a small fish and beats it senseless against a log before swallowing it in one gulp.
"Look at the colors on that bird," Rodriguez exhorts. "See that rusty patch on the breast? It's a male. His head looks positively too big for his body. That's one beautiful bird."
Six of us in two canoes, on a warm Texas spring day caressed by a light breeze, have entered the tabernacle of birding, and we are all infected with Rodriguez's passion for this region's natural bounty.
On the birding trail
McAllen, Pharr, Alamo and Mission are just a few in a string of border towns that line the Rio Grande in South Texas. None is close to a major city: Brownsville is 60 miles away. McAllen, the largest of the four with a population of about 110,000, has just one tall high-rise. The city is burgeoning with strip malls, fast-food joints and inexpensive chain hotels, all built to accommodate the ever-increasing numbers of "Winter Texans" who come down from places like Minneapolis and Winnipeg to square-dance and escape the cold, and the Mexican nationals who cross the border each day to shop, eat and work. Spanish, not English, is the dominant language, and you can scan the entire AM radio dial and find just two English-speaking stations.
While McAllen is booming, other nearby towns, such as Alamo, are still dominated by fields of onions, cotton and sorghum. There is real poverty here. But the edges of the rusted mobile homes with their chained front-yard mongrels are softened by pastel sunrises, patches of wild sunflowers and olive sparrows on the wire, bills thrown back in song. Such is the effect of the region's natural beauty.
The idea of this place as a Mecca for outdoor-loving naturalists seemed a little far-fetched not that long ago. While the potential was there, locals were slow to figure out that binocular-toting tourists with open wallets would come in large numbers to enjoy Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge (a 2,088-acre reserve established in 1943 specifically for the protection of migratory birds), Bentsen Rio Grande State Park and Anzalduas County Park, undeveloped lands that sit smack in the middle of a geographic migration funnel anchored by the Rio Grande.
Birds and butterflies amass here in great numbers, either as they pass though from wintering grounds in Mexico and farther south, or as permanent residents. It is one of the few places in the United States that attracts unusual tropical birds.
Nationwide, wildlife-watching has become a popular — and profitable — pursuit. According to the most recent U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service survey, in 2001 more than 18 million people traveled to bird-watch. Wildlife-watchers spent about $8.2 billion, the study concluded, with about $229 million dropped in Texas.
Nancy Millar, director of the McAllen Convention and Visitors Bureau and originator of the 9-year-old Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival in nearby Harlingen (granddaddy of the now 20 or so Texas nature festivals that draw thousands of tourists), was one of the first chamber of commerce types to spearhead the effort to convince business and political leaders that they could make money by saving the land. "I just kept at them," Millar said. "It was just so obvious that our natural attributes were a wonderful way to draw tourists to our region."
Birding is big business
Over the years, a strange partnership of dollar-hungry business leaders, government officials and tree-hugging bird-watchers has evolved, and in the past decade, they have joined forces to pull the region into a world where ecotourism is big bucks. A recent survey estimated that more than 95,000 nature tourists visit the Lower Rio Grande Valley annually, injecting nearly $39 million into McAllen alone.
Birders from around the world have been drawn by the new Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail, a $1.4 million, 700-plus-mile route completed in 2000 that starts near the border of Louisiana, hugs the coast through these border towns and then moves along the river to just south of Laredo. The World Birding Center, a trail of nine nature-viewing sites to be constructed in coming years east to west across Texas, from South Padre Island to Roma, is expected to attract even more travelers.
Birders from England, Germany and France are already everywhere, traveling in twos and threes, intent on adding scores of new birds to their "life lists" of the species they've seen. "We're only here because the birds are here," says Eugene Hood, a pensions administrator from Kent, England, who was on a 17-day trip through southern Texas with two friends, hoping to add a couple of hundred bird species to his life list of 1,000. Don and Jan Pirie, from Connecticut, who have traveled to Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, and other exotic birding locations, are typical of the American birders who visit the valley. "It's one of the best birding spots in the country," said Don Pirie. "Everyone talks about birding in South Texas."
Like Hood and Pirie, I had come to this birding crossroads to experience the yearly spring commute and, even more important, to see the many specialty birds found in the United States only in this small corner of Texas.
Final research
On the plane ride down, I thumbed through books that described the green jay, plain chachalaca, olive sparrow, Altamira oriole, long-billed thrasher, hook-billed kite, clay-colored robin, northern beardless-tyrannulet and ferruginous pygmy owl — birds I could never hope to see without making this trip. My plan was simple: to add as many of these rare birds to my life list as possible, while allowing time to appreciate the local flavor.
At the end of my first day, spent mostly around the Santa Ana National Refuge, I did a quick assessment: I'd seen 67 species, at least 25 for the first time. They ranged from Swainson's hawks drifting high overhead to a female rose-throated becard, a bird usually found in more tropical locales.
On my second day of bird-watching, Rodriguez and Martin Hagne, another top area birder who is also director of the Valley Nature Center in nearby Weslaco, and I cruised the suburban streets of the town of Pharr like a SWAT team on the hunt. The van was still moving when Rodriguez swung open the door, stage-whispering: "I hear them. I hear them. Let's go."
We spilled onto someone's front lawn, trying to ignore the huge dogs lumbering toward us, as Rodriguez trained his binoculars on a flock of noisy red-crowned parrots, another species rarely found in the United States.
They took off, and so did we, jumping back in the van and following the flock as it winged north. Amazingly, we found them again, this time getting a close-up view of the large, brilliantly colored parrots.
Next, we moved on to Bentsen Rio Grande State Park, slated to be the headquarters of the World Birding Center. Two more "wow" birds — a nesting gray hawk and a northern beardless-tyrannulet, which is much smaller than its name — got added to my list.
Border Patrol is close by
On Day 3, the omnipresent U.S. Border Patrol followed our truck, the jeep pulling over as we launched the canoes in an isolated portion of the Santa Ana refuge. Rodriguez shrugged; he is used to their presence. "They don't give us any trouble," he said.
As we paddled, Rodriguez told how he nearly tripped over an illegal immigrant who had curled up to die in 110-degree heat one day last summer. Returning from a six-hour round trip to see the curlew sandpiper, a Eurasian bird that had been blown off course, Rodriguez stopped at a highway rest stop and followed bluebirds as they flew through a stand of trees into the scrubby desert.
There he found the nearly unconscious man, mumbling prayers in Spanish. An ambulance was called, the man's life was saved, and Rodriguez, who had almost said no to the trip, decided that driving three hours each way to see a rare bird may have a greater purpose.
We docked our canoes and I headed back into the refuge, trying to squeeze out just one more bird to add to my life list before heading to the airport. I hit pay dirt with a black-crested titmouse.
During the flight home, I listed the birds I've seen — 100 species, 44 of them new to me. My North American bird list has been jolted to 325 (out of a possible 900 or so species), which, while not impressive in the serious birder world, delights me.