Texas: my first visit to South Padre Island and the Rio Grande Valley
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I just got back from my first ever iNatting trip to Texas. It was supposed to be 8 days, but we lost half of the first 24 hours because we were unable to land at Brownsville due to severe fog. The plane had to turn around and fly back to the Dallas / Fort Worth Airport. We spent the night there, awake and uncomfortable. We were a group of five people, headed up by Steve Rosenthal, who is a very keen sheller from Long Island in New York State. During the Texas trip, all five of us stayed on South Padre Island (SPI). My husband and I stayed in a two-bedroom condo vacation rental which was directly on the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). The rental was quite expensive, but the unit was spacious and luxurious, decorated lushly with a beach theme, and the views from the 3rd floor unit, which overlooked the dunes, beach, and water, were absolutely fantastic, like a free iMax movie running all of the daylight hours through the big windows of the living room and master bedroom. That same glorious view was also somewhat visible from the side window in the second bedroom. And at night, looking out of the main windows you could see the lights of three or four oil rigs in the far distance.
The nature in that part of Texas was amazing to me. For example, I could hardly believe that almost every one of the numerous common weed species in the city of SPI was entirely unfamiliar to me. And the flat areas on the mainland to the south of SPI were almost completely covered in huge expanses of Opuntia and Yucca. The extensive dunes on SPI supported a fascinating community of plants that are tolerant of salt, sand, wind and dryness. And on a Groundcherry plant on the dunes next to the condo building, I found a Chrysomelid beetle species that was a completely new addition to the iNat database: Lema pubipes. That was a nice surprise.
As for the marine mollusk species, I could recognize almost all of those species from my numerous visits to Sanibel on the Gulf Coast of Florida. But a few Western Gulf species were brand new to me, including the Western Banded Tulip, the Texas Lightning Whelk, the Cancellate Cantharus, and a few others. On the Gulf beaches I was happy to see quite a few Cannonball Jellies, which I had long admired in other people's GOM observations, but which were new to me.
However, a lot of the shell searching we carried out was done on mud flats on the shores of the huge hyper-saline lagoon, Laguna Madre. That was true both on Port Isabel, and on the southern tip of South Padre Island itself. The mud flats were quite rich in marine gastropod species, and in hermit-crabbed shells, but the mudflats were unpleasantly mucky. Steve Rosenthal, having ventured quite far out on the mudflats, managed to lose one of his favorite shelling sneakers while he was walking back. His leg had sunk so deep into the glutinous mud, that he arrived back to the car with only one shoe, and a muddy sock on the other foot.
We did also briefly check one or two of the nice clean sandy Gulf beaches, and in some cases there were quite a lot of shells there, although nothing really compared to the extraordinary numbers of shells on Sanibel. But I found the Hooked Mussel, the Brown Rangia, and countless examples of the Chemnitz Triangular Ark; and all of those were species that were new to me.
One day we drove out to two of the many fine nature preserves that are situated in the lower Rio Grande Valley. We saw the Border Wall/Border Fence frequently, and even crossed it back and forth a few times where the fence runs a short distance south of the actual border. The part of Cameron County which is near the border there is flat and agricultural, and in human terms it mostly seems impoverished. We saw one small house flying the Confederate flag. In the Santa Ana National Wildlife Preserve, at the bird feeder near the Nature Center, I got to see a Fox Squirrel, the Altamira Oriole and the Audubon's Oriole. By one of the Pintail Lakes I saw a Greater Kiscadee. And in both that preserve and the Sabal Palm Sanctuary, I saw Green Jays, which are very spectacular in the coloring of their plumage.
The weather was mostly a bit cold and windy almost all week, so because of that, sad to say there were not many butterflies flying.
Near the end of the trip I went on an early-morning bird walk at the Birding, Nature Center, and Alligator Refuge on SPI. I saw a lot of water bird species, including the new-to-me duck species Black-bellied Whistling Duck, Northern Pintail, Mottled Duck, Redhead Duck, and Blue-winged Teal.
All in all, our Texas trip was a very rich iNatting opportunity! In just barely over a week I found over 151 species that were new to me! it was quite an education!
susanhewitt
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