Guadalupe Mountains National Park.
The Great February Birding Trip Map
Tonight, we’re outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico for the night. We can count birds while we’re here if we want, but they won’t count for our Texas list.
Four new Texas birds today:
Sage Thrasher
Townsend’s Solitaire
Western Bluebird
Acorn Woodpecker
Bird count. 257. Birds remaining. 143.
This is a pretty cool place. The collection of rocks, overhangs, fractures, and hollows has hosted humans off and on for ten thousand years. Water collects in cracks, crevices, and holes serving a wide variety of plants and animals. The park is a treasure trove of pictographs, pottery shards, stone tools, and rock mortars. There are over 200 pictographs scattered throughout. Today, it’s used mostly for climbing, bouldering, and birding.
We moved to a different site today.
Normal prickly pear cactus.
Special red prickly pear here. It’s called violet prickly pear.
A travel machine.
With a very cool name. It’s a Royal Enfield. It’s the oldest continually produced motorcycle brand in the world. British/Indian. Himalayan model for on-road and off-road touring.
If you squint your eyes just right, you might see a sea otter floating on its back in this desert sea.
Dark-eyed junco.
Canyon towhee.
New birds today:
White-throated Swift.
Canyon Wren.
Bird Count. 253. Count remaining. 147.
Canada Goose.
Crissal Thrasher.
Northern Rough-winged Swallow.
Missed the Burrowing Owl.
We’ve shed El Paso and we’re at Hueco Tanks State Park.
The Great February Birding Trip Map
Birds remaining. 149.
Scaled Quail.
Now we’re in El Paso.
The Great February Birding Trip Map
There are several city parks here that might be holding some birds we want.
We would have gone to Balmorhea State Park to camp, but they’re closed indefinitely; a major rehab project. Instead, we stayed at Saddleback Mountain RV Park.
The Great February Birding Trip Map
Balmorhea Lake was very good to us. Six new species of birds for the year.
Curved-billed thrashers. Not new.
Eared grebe. New.
Hooded merganser. New.
Bird count remaining at the start of the trip. 161. Current count remaining. 154.
