Texas Bird Trail

This stretch of the Texas coast is full of marshes and wetlands, and refineries, and oil ports, and chemical plants, and divine beaches and great herons, fantastic birding, and big mosquitoes. What a combo.
Spent one night at Quintana Beach and Neo Tropical Bird Sanctuary. (Not sure what that means). Very tropical, palm trees, thatched huts, Hurricane Ike damage from 2008 nearly repaired. Oil tankers sliding by just over the trees to load and a large nitrogen plant out the other side. Very surreal.  Mosquitoes so bad they bite while you walk and through your shirt. So, guess we are in West Nile Virus country too. We don't usually like to use bug repellent, and what we had was probably 15 years old, and not very effective. So we stayed behind our screens and used their free wifi and took showers and limited our outdoor time. Next grocery stop we got the big can of spray and will just have to learn to deal with this in the wetlands areas. Padre Island had no bugs, so another reason to "go home" eventually.

Moved on to Matagorda Island Nature Park. 1600 acres of wetlands and beaches at the mouth of the Colorado River. Really like this place. Crowded when we arrived on Saturday as the Casita trailer club was here. Must have been 60 of those cute little rounded fiberglass rigs and several scamps too. They all left on Sunday and we settled in with only 4 or 5 rigs left in the campground. We can do long term stays here and they rent kayaks, but we need a rig to be able to get them into the east bay and wetlands and we are not good enough for any of the surf or ocean waves close by. Took a long bike ride on the beach and into the wetlands. Birding here is great. Lots of herons and egrets around us and sandpipers and plovers on the beach. Lots of hawks and falcons. Trying hard to identify them all. Wish we had a better camera to snap them for later study.
 Huge long dock goes out for fishing and folks are lined up and pulling them in regularly. Surf fishing without having to get wet! Water here is very silty and dark. Mosquitoes only bad early and late. We will head out today for Magnolia Beach and Aransas Wildlife Preserve to see the wintering whooping cranes. Supposedly the only place they are other than northern Canada in the summer. Then slowly moving our way back towards Padre. Can't seem to find a reason to leave this area. We will stay at least through the holidays and maybe much longer.

Doug and Frankie are on their way. After tolerating several weeks of gloom and rain they have made it through a hole in the weather, barely skirted through some of the CA downpour and will be here in a week or two. We are looking forward to camping with them. Good pals and a lot of fun.
Working on some of you also to come enjoy a winter break with us.


Life is short...., we are all getting old,  jump on new adventures while you can!