Steve and Judy's Travels!

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this digital world of shopping, we spend less on time and transportation and get practically everything delivered to us.  That generates a lot of cardboard boxes received at our house.  We could recycle them, and recycling cardboard is probably a sound practice (unlike maybe plastic), but that would require a lot of energy to melt down the old boxes, just so they can be reconstituted as new boxes made out of recycled material.  So I break down all the shipping boxes, and stash them in the back of the Mazda.

 

Any time I’m already in town and pass by the local Mailbox Depot store, I stop and carry all the boxes in.  The mailbox store adds them to their inventory and reuses them.  Dropping them off doesn’t really require any extra resources on our part except a little time.  All the packing material we receive goes in a plastic trash sack and gets dropped off as well.

 

The mailbox store provides these “re-used” boxes and packing material, at no charge, to their patrons who could use a little extra help when they ship something; the store will pack it up for free.  Recycling is better than the landfill, re-using takes less energy than recycling, and the shop does a good deed as well.  Hats off to them; Mailbox Depot.  Brilliant!

 

 

 

Sometimes, this is the best look we get at a bird.  The challenge is to identify all the birds we can, often from incomplete information.  The white eye ring, small size, and long tail make this look like a blue-gray gnatcatcher.

 

Sure enough, when we get a better look, that’s what it is.

 

 

The little green dot in the reeds across the pond.  It’s pretty far away, even with high magnification.

 

That’s a green kingfisher.

 

This cool guy in the tree.

 

It’s a monk parakeet, who ends up giving us a great view.

 

 

 

 

The King’s salt.

 

And this is where they got that salt; a shallow hypersaline lake seven times saltier than the ocean.  It was an important source of salt for the earliest Americans, then the Spanish, Mexicans, and Texans as each arrived.  It continues to serve as a source of salt for native animals.  It’s a protected wildlife preserve now.  Even as salty as that water is, it is an important stopover for migrating birds, and winter home to 10% of the world’s population of long-billed curlews.

 

The preserve is a half-hour drive from our house.  The lake itself is about a one-mile walk from the parking area, so that cuts down on the amount of visitors.  Once you get to the lake, it’s a crunchy walk along the shore on the dried salt.

 

Off to one side, there is a little freshwater spring.

 

Birds on the way in and out.

 

 

 

Long-billed curlews in the water.

 

And least sandpipers along the shoreline.

 

 

It can get a person feeling moody; reflecting on their time in the military.  The year I spent in Viet Nam; one word doesn’t describe what my reflections trigger; melancholy, sad, somber; it’s a combination.  In a tropical war zone, ever wary of the constant danger, sometimes in foxholes, sometimes rolled up in a poncho sleeping in the rain and mud, sometimes being shot at, without enough decent food to eat; the experience left an indelible mark on me and on every other person there.  We did this because we were called on in service to our country.  I was one of the lucky ones who got to home.  Fifty thousand of us died in that effort.

 

Now, these years later we face another even more deadly threat, right here in our own land.  In one year this invisible viral enemy has killed five times the number of Americans as in the ten years of the Viet Nam war; and all of these newly dead are not off in some distant land, but right here at home, on our own soil, dying without their loved ones by their sides; and it gets worse every day.  We have an opportunity to hold this menace at bay while we wait for reinforcements.  It’s our next call to duty.  We can follow CDC guidance by wearing masks, distancing, and washing our hands.  It may not be what we want to be doing, but just like before, when you can see what needs to be done, you just do it.

 

Is this such a sacrifice that it goes beyond what we Americans should be asked to do for our country?  Is wearing a mask an infringement of our individual rights?  I don’t think so.  We know what real hardships are.  This is not a difficult ask.  It’s not an assault on our freedoms, it’s an inconvenience.  Can we all just put on our masks for a few more months, spare as many American lives as we can, and get a handle on this thing?