Editorials & Essays

More than 540 species have been recorded in Texas, and the Rio Grande Valley alone counts 504 of those, including accidentals. Numbers can change, but the fact remains that California, in 2nd place, is at least 80 species behind.

This is a list of birds that have been seen on the one thousand acres of Paseo de la Resaca, and it is just that, a list, not a guidebook.

That said, we sincerely hope to inspire you to add to this list, 116 species so far, and, upon seeing a hooded warbler (in breeding plumage) for the first time you will say, “why haven’t I done this before?”

The Least Tern is one of those birds you just have to admire. What is lacked in size is compensated by attitude.

With the creation of Resaca Calmada (and concurrent leveling) the Paseo inadvertently provided the two necessities for this species: open, bare ground (acres of it) and a nearby food source. Although it has never been stocked, the Resaca Calmada immediately produced fish. Red-eared perch, Rio Grande perch, Tilapia, Shad, and most importantly for the tern, an abundance of mosquito minnows.

With the leveling came open ground, and the Least Tern likes it bare. A mating pair will lay 2–3 eggs on such a spot and then spend the next several weeks defending them from grackles, seagulls, cats, and man. When the eggs hatch the work is doubled, now the pair has to defend and feed the hatchlings. There is not a better example of parental responsibility in the natural world.

And then of course comes man. We have nesting concentrations (as early as March–April) of one nest every 50 ft. All of it in the shadow of heavy equipment. All on lots to be developed. What do you do? Stopping work was not an option.

What happened is this. First, the earth-moving company’s owner and foreman were willing to cooperate. Secondly, we marked each nest with a surveyor stake. Lastly, and most importantly, we depended on the fearless nature of the Least Tern.

I know what I am about to say will strain all credibility, but the fact is the operators would put a huge blade within twelve inches of a nest, the terns raised holy hell while it was close, but as soon as the blade passed they were back on the nest. We saw dozens of successful nestings from egg to hatchling to flight, all of it noisy, busy, unbelievable.

I’m not going to say some nests weren’t destroyed by those big blades, although I never saw it. If a nest was destroyed, it was because I failed to mark it. What I can say is this: the only nests I saw destroyed were by grackles and laughing gulls. In the six years I have been at the Paseo, I will testify that we have seen 60 to 70 percent successful nesting attempts every year.

And it will be the same next spring.

November of 2002 I am in the Paseo pasture that runs north of 802 and east of Paredes Line Road. I’m looking at different birds of prey, harriers mainly, when I see what looks like a black vulture. It carries itself like a buzzard but it seems smaller. Suddenly it folds wing like an F14 and dives, at speed, to the ground.

This is not buzzard behavior. The kill attempt is unsuccessful, but the style was pure raptor. I’m on this bird with my glasses as it recovers, flying straight overhead, black from head to leg with two very murky white/grey bands at the trailing end of its tail. It is a Zone-Tailed Hawk, not a bird we normally see in the Eastern Valley.

I call the Audubon Rare Bird Alert in Weslaco and two days later their team confirms it. The Paseo Zone Tail has made the rare bird alert.

Each fall since, this hawk has shown up. In 2003 it stayed 3 months (Nov–Jan). I saw it this year earlier than usual, mid-September. This regularity makes me think it is the same individual. The Zone Tail is relatively common in far West Texas, it is of the desert, but the Paseo has attracted a stray. Why?

Ornithologists have a phrase that might explain, “Post-Breeding Dispersal,” and that dispersal applies to young males, adolescent birds bullied by more mature males, scared and maybe heartbroken, they just take off to see the other side of the mountain.

Perhaps our own Zone Tail was an adolescent once, but why has he continued to return?

Bill Hudson and I are on his patio facing Resaca de la Palma and it is a beautiful spring afternoon. Suddenly there are hawks cruising low over the resaca. We see Harris hawks regularly, but today it’s everything, Mexican Grays, Swainson’s, Broadwings, all of them very low, maybe two dozen. Then we look up.

In the sky, up four thousand feet, are thousands of migrating hawks, kettle after kettle. Mainly Swainson’s and Broadwings with Grays, Vultures, and Harriers mixed in.

The kettles continue until dark, each one with hundreds together. I honestly can only guess at the total sum but it had to be tens of thousands. The sky was full. There was no more air space left. A plane would have to divert from this.

I’ve seen big concentrations in Tamaulipas in late September, but not like that afternoon in April. A concentration this large, this far east, is rare. You could even say special.

Birding is like hunting: to be successful you need to be alert. And for birders on the Paseo, the month of April, of any year, is a time for it.

I’m not naïve about the natural world. In fact, I am a consistent predator. I have preyed on wildlife from Venezuela to the Yukon Territory, and will continue to. That understood, I don’t kill for pleasure, and I obey restrictions my own species places on me.

But the Great-Tailed Grackle is more like some humans than any other wild thing I know of. They are intelligent, they communicate with each other, they cooperate for the common purpose, and that purpose is to eliminate all other birds from their niche. No other bird, not even a bird of prey, can nest in a grackle colony. They won’t allow it. They are the Islamic Jihad of birds. They kill to prove a point, we are supreme.

The big male grackle will rip the bottom out of an oriole’s nest just to see the eggs fall. He will take on a pair of killdeer during the hottest part of mid-day and wear them down. He destroys more doves, in the egg stage, than all the shotguns in Texas times ten.

My only effective ally in this war is the Mockingbird. There is a reason this is our state bird. It wasn’t that voice that made them great, it was their heart. If you want a diversity of bird life in your yard, then pray for a mockingbird to choose it as a nest site. Otherwise, well, the grackles will decide for you.

In my yard are many nesting trees for dove, kiskadee, and mockingbird. During nesting season the grackles attack in great numbers. The mockingbirds will not let them take their nest, but the other, more timid birds are helpless. So I have learned the mockingbird’s defense call. When I hear it I take my air gun, and when the mockingbird sees me they head for the grackle, driving it into the open and holding it there. I have killed grackles with mockingbirds not twelve inches away, and when the grackle falls they don’t move, they watch it fall and then break out in song.

A moment like that can make your day.

The Black-Bellied Whistling Duck is not a migrant, it is an immigrant.

Up from the south, starting in the mid 70’s, now a permanent resident from the edge of the Edwards Plateau to the Piney Woods. A cavity nester, this duck will lay its eggs on the ground if it has to, up to 20 in a clutch. It needs some water nearby, but a two-acre stock tank will do.

More goose-like than other ducks, the long-legged whistler can graze on grass and young weed sprouts when grain is not available. They walk and rest more than they fly, and, again more like geese, they fly at night as often as by day.

They are heroic parents. Their young are rarely taken off the nest; if they lose young it’s when they’re learning to swim, and their most ferocious enemies are the soft-shelled turtle and the diamondback water snake. Flexible, like the white-wing, each year both range and number increase.

They can be raised anywhere along a resaca. Just put up a nest box, 24 inches high by 20 deep, with an 8-inch hole near the bottom, five feet off the ground. Best of all, the whistling ducks will not use your patio or driveway as a toilet, one good habit they haven’t changed. That’s more than I can say for the domesticated Muscovy and its crossbred legacy.

When I was growing up in Brownsville we saw our white-wing dove leave after the October frosts. Conventional wisdom saw a bleak future for the white-wings in Texas. To see the stupendous flights once common, you had to go down to Tamaulipas.

Then it turned upside down.

In the early 70’s white-wings were noticed all along the lower Nueces, nesting successfully in “new” habitat. By 1980 Bexar County had them, nesting in town and feeding in the corn and milo fields. Then Austin, then Waco, then Dallas/Fort Worth, then Wichita Falls of all places. You could draw a line up Interstate 35 and track the movement north. State wildlife officials put the San Antonio flock at 3 million and growing, and that flock doesn’t even migrate.

What this means is that conventional wisdom was wrong. White-wings have the single trait that all successful species must possess. They are flexible. They can change their ancient habits, they can adapt. No ebony trees? Then that dense ornamental will do. Freezing cold today? That’s okay, the humans broadcast feed on their driveways and their homes radiate enough heat. We can make it.

And here at Brownsville the urban forests provide nest sites, and up river and down the farmers plant sunflowers, nectar to a dove. And the flights are stupendous, like the 50’s.

Drought is the nightmare that haunts Texas. In the 1950’s, five straight years of it nearly destroyed the yeoman class of ranchers. One missed payment led to foreclosure, never mind fifteen years of on-time history. So they cried, they died, or went to town.

I lived in Uvalde then, the son of a Presbyterian minister. At a funeral I heard my father, in hushed tones, use two words as a complete sentence: drought suicide.

Those who survived were famous for their gallows humor. My father was close to those hard old men, and when he let me, I would sit at the coffee shop and listen. The question was “how dry is it,” and the reply had to have some base of reality. The more unusual the better, but it had to be true. To this day I remember two good ones: “it’s so dry the buzzards are flying in formation,” and “it’s so dry the owls are fishing.”

You can read every bird book ever written and not find one comment that substantiates either observation. But the fact is that both are true.

Turkey vultures, in a time of great stress, will move from one place to another in a line, small groups strung out for miles, each drafting the one ahead. I like to call it the “NASCAR” formation. And after four years of drought, when an owl’s normal prey has vanished, that rancher who said his owls were fishing had watched one take small catfish out of a spring-fed pool like it would take a rat off the barn floor. It was an adult who chose not to starve.

In 1992 I saw a Harris hawk take mullet out of the Brownsville ship channel with as much skill as an osprey, and two others joined it. That is the point of all this: to survive, sometimes habits must change. Flexibility is everything. White-wing doves have it. Passenger pigeons didn’t.

I don’t know half of what nature is capable of, and it is a fool who says he does.

Steve’s defense of rodeo and hunting against the animal-rights critique. From a handwritten draft.

Criticism of some early rodeo practices was warranted, and the cowboy listened, and is still listening. But he resented then, and resents now, the charge of cruelty. When you consider the suffering an animal would endure in a natural state, the brief moments of discomfort when first handled by man, for the protection those considerations later provide, serve a purpose.

Class prejudice has always bedeviled American rodeo, unlike Mexico, which exalts the same skills. And rodeo’s injuries are not intentional, as they are in boxing, where injury is the desired result. If rodeo is the last stronghold of redneck individualism, its growth has forced it to take account of a great many outside considerations, and in that the animal-rights agitator, often unfair, has probably served to sharpen an awareness of them. Rodeo has grown and improved while keeping its original character. That testifies to its strength.

Should the day come when the “cruel” sports like rodeo and hunting are banned in this country, that will be the day this “animal abuser of the new age” goes outlaw. No consoling from the “Committee for the Awareness of Sentient Beings” will do me any good. They’ll have to send me to their re-education camp.

Here is what a bronc rider knows. A bonafide outlaw horse, a true bucking horse, is rare, highly prized, and valuable to no one outside pro rodeo. He is true to an ancient code. He will never submit. That is why we value him. We ride him so that he may fulfill his life’s purpose. Only in North and South America is an outlaw horse allowed to live. Anyone who knows horses knows an animal either is, or is not, outlaw; no strap or device will change that state. And on rare occasions a gentle horse will decide, on its own, to give up its conventional life and join the rough string.

Steve’s own byline, filed to his hometown paper after eight days by mule across the Sierra Madre Oriental in March 1981.

It was eight days in the saddle in Mexico for four Uvalde men last March. Jim Kothmann, Willie Edwards, Jim Woodward and the author rode by mule from Zaragoza, in southern Nuevo León, to La Meca, in western Tamaulipas. I outfitted the ride and Miquel Melledin provided guide service.

Accompanying these five at various stages of the trek were Monico Morales and Martino Martinez, two of the most knowledgeable old-timers in the region. Martinez was particularly impressive. At the age of 80, he was able to perform, on foot, an incredible four-hour march across canyon and ridge that would have crippled most men half his age.

Indeed, if one converses with any of the Uvaldeans who made the trip, the most striking impression they will probably relate is the extraordinary physical stamina of all of the Mexican guides, the youngest of whom, Melledin, is 68 years old.

Camp fire talk among the three viejos (ancient ones) often contained references to the “bad old days” after the 1915 revolution supposedly ended. In the Sierra Madre Oriental of western Tamaulipas (locally known as the Sierra Gordo), land disputes, water rights, fights, family feuds, etc., were intense up to the 1930’s.

Martinez, for example, was burned out seven different times between 1915 and 1935. His father and two brothers were killed. To this day, the Sierra Gordo is affected. There are fewer people now actively engaged in ranching than there were in 1915.

For the localities, the performance of the un-shod mules were certainly educational. It was unanimously conceded, no quarter horse any of the men had ever known could have kept up the pace day after day, canyon after canyon, kept by those eight 13-hand-high 800-pound mules.

The weather was excellent. Most days were mild while nights and early mornings were chilly.

The altitudes were uniformly high. Puerto Del Aire Pass (Gate of the Wind) was the highest elevation we actually crossed at 9,800 feet. Mount Peña Nevada rises to 13,500 feet with the springs of the Chihue River, barely 10 miles away as the crow flies, at 5,000 feet. Such rapid descent should give some idea of how rough and broken the region is.

The vegetation is Piñon Pine on top of the ridges with Joshua trees and chaparral at lower altitudes. There are heavy strands of Ponderosa Pine and firs, with even a few quaking Aspen, on Peña Nevada. Cottonwood and oak trees grow in the creek bottoms.

There are two forks of the Chihue River. We rode to the confluence, but even after the forks merge, it is a smaller river than the Frio. The deeper downriver you ride the closer you get to the Tropic of Cancer.

As a matter of fact, it was at the two forks of the Chihue we found a hungry colony of vampire bats. Each of our mules was bitten at least once, leaving two-inch rivulets of dried blood about where the neck meets the shoulder.

The trip was satisfying for both the riders and the guides. We were different people from different worlds. A 30-mile trip for any of us would take that many minutes to drive. For Martinez, we would do it on foot across country rougher than the Big Bend, it would take a day and a half.

The point is not that either way is better, the point is that Martinez’s way still exists.