Author: Steve

 

 

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1UDWCRPxwTpvIKAUhAJNTaLQqbQA-E3eI&ll=26.442829212158454%2C-98.24115226038884&z=17

 

Not your usual birding hotspot.  It’s not really anything.  Just a dusty dirt road, some farm ponds, and there isn’t even a spot to pull a car off the road.  I park at the entrance to a plowed field at one end and walk out and back.

 

 

But it is a place with birds.  Our latest visit there got us 24 species in half an hour.  Here is an unusual one for us; an American Robin.  They don’t often come this far south.  Funny how one person’s common bird is another person’s rare find.  Geography matters!

 

And a charming little Eastern Phoebe.  They are not uncommon here.

 

 

Without revisiting this particular election, when you just look at a map of how states vote, or especially how counties vote, there is an obvious divide.  City folks tend to vote democratic.  Rural folks tend to vote republican.  I wonder why that is.  This is a really easy observation to make.  There should be an obvious answer, right?  But every idea I have about why that might be so, just generates more questions.  Too many “why’s”.

 

 

 

 

It’s a pretty cool place.  Trails in concentric circles can get a person turned around if they’re new to it and didn’t pick up a map on the way in.  It can take a while to find the way out.  I know whereof I speak.

 

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1UDWCRPxwTpvIKAUhAJNTaLQqbQA-E3eI&ll=26.20571055994142%2C-98.26535790592992&z=18

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s the closest place we can go out for a walk.  It’s only a mile from our house.

 

Here is the map link.

 

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1UDWCRPxwTpvIKAUhAJNTaLQqbQA-E3eI&ll=26.390274286026596%2C-98.15888647471073&z=15

 

If the map isn’t on satellite view already, click that button and you can see the trails available to us.  I can walk an out and back between the two entrances.  I can walk around the lake labeled Edinburg Lake on the map, or I can do that long way round at the top.  Each track gets me different habitat.

 

This road between those two entrances used to be open to local traffic.  It was too good a spot to go fish, drink, then accidentally drive your car into the lake though, so the water district gave up and closed the road to the public.  The first time we drove it, I was watching for birds and the only thing I saw was an osprey.  I determined it was a bird-desert.  After they closed the road I called and got permission to walk it.  No problem.  It’s not a place many people go; mostly just the occasional person illegally fishing.  It’s not on anybody’s birding hotspot map.  But once I started walking it, I discovered there is a lot more going on here than I first thought.  Not a bird desert at all, last walk there yielded thirty different species of birds.  The “me now” really taught something to the “me then” that thought there weren’t any birds here.

 

The road is lined with native river cane.  Its domestic cousin, sugar cane, is widely grown in the Valley as an agricultural crop.

 

 

 

There are several different lakes.  They constitute the water storage for the city.

 

 

And there are remains of a ranching history.

 

With black vultures hanging out in silhouette.

 

 

The Old Hidalgo Pumphouse.

 

 

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1UDWCRPxwTpvIKAUhAJNTaLQqbQA-E3eI&ll=27.58125535416511%2C-97.97055618870802&z=8

 

The salt lakes I wrote about are north.  The pumphouse is south.  I put them on the map link above.

 

If you zoom in on the pumphouse and click the “satellite” button, you can see how it is situated.  The pumphouse used to provide water from the Rio Grande to irrigate the valley.  Agriculture has been a big deal here since the early 1900s.

 

You might wonder why, if the purpose of the pumphouse was to pump water from the Rio Grande, they didn’t build it right on the river.  Well, the answer is that they did build it right on the river, but in 1933 a hurricane flooded the valley and when the water went down, the river was relocated a half a mile away.  The channel you can see on the map had to be dug so that water from the river could once again reach the steam driven pumps of the pumphouse.

 

Now it’s a museum and world birding location.  Here is a walk around the grounds.