I felt a bit bad that on our first day of the RBVBF I took the last remaining space on a King Ranch trip and on an easy half day trip got to see Ferruginous Pygmy owl, while I scheduled her for a 5AM start on the Seedeater Sojourn. The weather had made the private ranch location for seedeater inaccessible and her bus drove 3.5 hours to the Laredo area where with lots of struggle she got a brief look at a single female bird. Today she took me back to the place she had visited after we drove to Laredo last night and we got there early. The place is near the bridge to Mexico and in a large stand of bull-rush like vegetation beside the Rio Grande. We walked into the paths and within a half-hour I spotted a male sitting high in a reed. We both got nice backlit views from about 40 feet for a minute or so. Later we saw two birds together, a male and a female at a bit longer range, but in good light. I was ecstatic, Kay was relieved that we didn’t need to stay the threatened extra day or two looking for the bird, and we enjoyed trying to ID sparrows. I was able to make Lincoln’s and Savannah, as well as an Indigo bunting female type.
We left by about 9 AM and went on to Falcon Dam. I was excited to bring Kay here as I had such fond memories of my first trip here when Ken led a trip for 6 of us about 20 years ago. That year we got to the dam spill-off area at daybreak, our first moments birding the Rio Grande Valley. We had Great Kiskadee, Audubon’s Oriole, Ringed Kingfisher, and a fly-by Red-billed pigeon. Today when we arrived I was confused by the built up border-patrol presence. It turns out the not access is not allowed to the spill-off area, and we just stayed a few minutes with scopes from the border-crossing parking lot. Little to see and a sad result of our immigration/drug-war issues.
Next stop was at Chapeno, a “birders community” I had visited on our last trip. Little was changed here. It was still a run-down mobile home park, with a picnic area by the river. The big difference was that the Brown Jay has not visited the area in at least 2 years, and for birders that was the big draw.
By 3:30 PM we were back at Anzalduas Park to try again for Hook-billed Kite. We again walked up on the dike road, but a constable asked us to leave. He hovered while we more leisurely than he liked made our way back into the park. No kite seen, so off to McAllen for a night at the Drury Inn. It had happy hour complete with baked potatoes, Salad, Vegetarian soup, and Pasta so we made this with Margaritas a meal and turned in to watch the romcom “Hitch” and get a good night’s sleep.