Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge
/The second day of the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, we did not have any formal field trips scheduled. It was cool and cloudy – not a good day for butterflies, so we shifted our plans back to a focus on birds and headed for the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge.Some of the first things we saw on our hike was insects – still with the cold: two dragonflies
Two caterpillars, and
A queen butterfly…not fluttering about.
I was pleased to see a land snail on one of the small trees. We’d seen a lot of shells on the ground (i.e. dead) at both Las Estrellas and Rancho Lomitas. We were told that sometimes roadrunners get hungry enough to crack the shells against a rock to get to the tasty morsel inside.
Ball Moss is something I had never seen. It is like Spanish Moss – also abundant on trees in the refuge.
Then we saw some duck: Northern Shovelers and Blue winged teal.
A group of chachalaca were in the trees beside the trail. It was hard to get pictures through the foliage and branches…we’d get better pictures on another day.
As we walked across an empty parking lot, we spotted a kiskadee on an electrical line
And then a flash of orange in the trees – an Altamira Oriole was on the move. It eventually made it way to the electrical pole as well.
The refuge has a swinging bridge through tree tops. On the day we were there, the birds were hunkered down but it was still work the climb and the look down into foliage.
At a bird blind, I finally got some good pictures of the green jay.
We made our way back to the visitor center and had a snack on our way to nearby Estero Llano State Park (topic of tomorrow's post). In this area of Texas there are a series of state and federal lands that make a wild life corridor…more meaningful than each standalone park or refuge.
