On our last morning in Texas, we went to Edinburg Wetlands and Anzalduas Park, which looks right across the Rio Grande to Mexico. There were so many beautiful things at Anzalduas. I was hoping hard for scissor-tailed flycatchers, but we found other things. A kestrel, leaving a wire.
A glorious adult white-tailed hawk. Yum!
That bird in my previous post, heavily marked on belly and underwing, was a subadult. This adult's immaculate and unlike anything else flying.
Bill spotted a fabulous serpent slithering away from us in the park: a Texas indigo snake!!
Liam and Phoebe wanted to get away from it!
It was about 4.5' long, quite thick, and not very fast.
But highly intelligent and suspicious of my motives. Which were merely to capture its fluid beauty. It refused to cross the pavement while I was following it, even though some riprap and shrubbery on the other side beckoned safety. It knew that it would be unable to travel fast on smooth asphalt, so it stayed in the grass and gravel where it could gain some purchase with its belly scutes. Smart serpent.
But the stars of the show at Anzalduas (at least when the scissortails aren't there) are the vermilion flycatchers. Oh, what a bird. This is a female, I believe.
Check out the back of that crown!!
O perfect and beautiful bird, like a phoebe that got into the makeup trunk.
We waited, and the perfect happened: a young male vermilion flycatcher landed on a painted post. Ahhh. What a lovely Anzalduas farewell.
And so goodbye to the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, and the wondrous birds of south Texas.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
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