A day at Rockport Beach…

On one of our walks along Rockport Harbor we noticed adjacent to the harbor is a city park with a stretch of beach leading to a long pier. Upon reading more about the park we saw that there are plenty of facilities at Rockport Beach including pavilions suitable for beach weddings and lots of covered picnic sites (over 60 of them) complete with grills for barbequing as well.The 800 foot pier at the North end of the beach awaits you to fish as fishing is permitted just about anywhere at the park.

There is a fee to enter the Rockport Beach for vehicles only! The fee is actually a vehicle parking fee and can be had for the nominal fee of $5 daily or the better deal at $15 annually . However, an even better deal for walkers and cyclists is that there is no charge to enter by foot or bicycle and with plenty of nearby free parking this is exactly how we chose to enjoy Rockport Beach.

We felt it was a great place to get in a very relaxing walk.Starting at the Beach entrance we walked down the beach all the way to the end, then around the circle and headed back along the bayside to to the Beach entrance point.  This made for a pleasant two mile walk. An added bonus was the tide was out and the exposed sand flats had plenty of birds to look at who reside here during this time of the year.

We observed large groups of Avocets, Black Skimmers, Marbled Godwits and Long Billed Curlews. There are even areas of the beach that are closed and protected for for the Black Skimmers' exclusive use for nesting sites.

Also just outside the park entrance is the Bay Education Center which is free and open to the public, Tuesday through Saturday, 1-4 pm, Here that have a nice exhibit about the local estuaries to educate us about the important role these habitats play in our ecology. The Bay Education Center provides a fun way of learning about these important bodies of water and the life they support but don’t get too close to the stuffed Whooping Cranes because it almost appears as if  they just might peck at you…

The Rockport Beach itself is nothing to write home about because it isn’t an overly scenic beach mostly since the sand is of a very coarse nature. But given this excellent facility is so close by and offers such a great place to combine a nice walk along the beach and bayside with some decent birding it is a perfect place for us to visit while in the area…