Kay and I spent our last time in the Lower Rio Grande Valley this morning at the Sabal Palm Sanctuary in Brownsville. The visit was notable for the incredible lack of birds, the vast swarms of mosquitos, seeing the infamous “wall” and meeting Greg Miller, the character Jack Black played in the movie The Big Year. The palm forest is beautiful and Kay did finally get a good look at an Olive Sparrow by the feeders. Here is a photo of the spot with Greg Miller the big guy in the denim shirt.

From there we went to the Laguna Atascosa NWR where it was blistering hot and we just made a brief visit. My memories were of a really cool auto tour drive, but this has been closed recently because two Ocelot’s were hit by autos. We left there about 11:30 AM to chase a lifer, Northern Jacana, at Choke Canyon State Park about 3.5 hours drive (at 75 mph speed limit) north. I was worried the park would close at 5 PM like most state parks around do, but when we got there we found it stays open until 10 PM. We dashed for the overlook at 75 Acre Lake and arrived to see a spectacular marshy area packed with birds. There were well over 1000 American Coot, large numbers of Long-tailed Grackles, a nice variety of dabbling ducks, and a Juvenile Northern Jacana. Kay was scoping the the area with our travelling old Kowa and I found a likely suspect about 150-200 yards off behind a row of dead reeds. On getting it in the scope the ID was confirmed. The bird just walked around feeding, occasionally relocating using its wings and showing us the yellow primary feathers. The bird was backlit being west of the viewing area in late afternoon.
We stayed for a spectacular sunset then drove back to Corpus Christi, 75 minutes east, to stay at the Best Western.