Texas Trip :: Day 3 – Sabal Palm Audubon Center

By day 3 of our trip, we were getting into the swing of things – get up in the morning, grab some breakfast and then head out to whatever destination we had picked the night before. For day 3, we were reviewing recommendations from a variety of people, and decided to follow one that my friend Joe had told us to not miss – Sabal Palm Audubon Center, south of Brownsville. The weather was a bit cloudy and more than a little windy, but we figured we would give it a go anyway. The weather didn’t cooperate fully, but we still had a really cool time.

Getting there was a little more difficult than our previous excursions – our guide (Birder’s Guide to Texas) was published before Sabal Palm had established itself fully, and was little more than a mention in the book. The instructions I gotten online gave us directions to follow, but those directions – while functionally correct – relied somewhat on familiarity with the area (such as Rt. 4, 48 and Boca Chica Boulevard are the same road for a short while – not parallel or crossroads as we had expected). But after a few turns, we found our way to the park, catching some cool birds on the way in.

The park is smaller than Santa Ana or Laguna Atascosa, and has a much more local feel to it. The visitor center is a small building with a shop, counter and office all together, plus a small picnic area and feeder station next to it. We paid our entrance fee (unlike the previous two days, which were covered with our National Parks pass, we had to pay to get in). Because of our previous day’s exploits

with the butterflies, my wife surprised me with a copy of the “Butterflies through Binoculars – the West” to help us ID some of those species that weren’t in our eastern guide – a nice start to the day.

The park is smaller, with only a few trails that run through and around the perimeter of the park. The main path leads through some woods and grasslands, which were filled with a number of small, brown butterflies (which I still haven’t identified), and a number of smaller birds that flittered away before we could get a bead on them. Coming up to the lake boardwalk, we heard some interesting songs that turned out to be a Long-billed Thrasher, singing his heart out. From there, the boardwalk took us along a resaca where we started seeing a lot of cool dragonflies, including a Common Green Darter, a Great Blue Skimmer and our first Red Saddlebags, who I think actually followed us to get his photo taken. Further up the way, we came across a Great Kiskadee who was also being very photogenic, and then one of the highlights of the day – a pair of Least Grebes.

We watched the grebes – a species that only consistently seen in south Texas – diving and moving around a small pond at the edge of the boardwalk, fishing and hiding from our cameras as much as possible. They started pulling up some weeds from the bottom, and we realized that they were building a nest only about 3m off of the boardwalk. We watched them for a while, taking in their interaction and nest-building before moving on to see what else we could see.

Another trail took us down a brushy path that was full of all sorts of cool insects – if not birds – including my first Great Meadowhawk and a number of butterflies and skippers. I hadn’t thought that there would be as many butterflies out at this time of year, but we were following them (ridiculously) all over the place, trying in vain to get good shots of species that we knew would

be new ones – if we could get a good look or picture of them. Eventually, we came across a really nicely-built blind that extended into the resaca. It was huge – think of a grand gazebo for a dozen people, and then wall it in so that you can look out safely hidden from the view of the animals you want to watch.

Almost immediately, we were hooked. Swimming only a few feet from the nearest viewport was a Pied-billed Grebe feeding and giving us awesome looks at him/her (the best I’ve gotten, actually). Shari and I both shot at least 100 shots of him/her each before we really started looking around. The pond was filled with a number of great waterfowl species, and a fairly cool watersnake of some sort – although the birds were most of the excitement. We saw gadwall, best-ever looks at American coots, our first mottled ducks, ruddy ducks, least and pied-billed grebes. We hung out there for a while, giddy as we took picture after picture.

After a time, we decided to take off back to Laguna Arascosa, but decided to take one more look along the boardwalk to see if we could catch anything fun and interesting. Our surprise, however, was when we got back to the least grebes. In the intervening 45 minutes or so since we walked away, they had actually laid an egg. We watched as they continued prepping the nest around it, and were amazed at how close we’d been to seeing the event. We missed it, but it was still pretty cool to see.

Bird Tally

SABAL PALM AUDUBON CENTER

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