Birding the Laguna Madre Nature Trail TX

One thing we always enjoy is visiting the Laguna Madre Nature Trail at the South Padre Island Convention Center. Once in the parking lot, visitors are  greeted by a wall painting of whales and dolphins. Just around the corner of this building is the start of the Laguna Madre Nature Trail.

Unlike the South Padre Island Birding & Nature Center located next door, this adventure is FREE! It includes a 1500 ft. boardwalk spanning over both salt and freshwater wetlands. The boardwalk is adjacent to a Central Power and Light Company station.The company built the boardwalk as part of a mitigation project due to wetland destruction caused by the construction of underground power lines.

This boardwalk allows visitors to view four acres of marshland. Many coastal and migratory birds as well as some small alligators can be seen.. Sharon and I will walk this boardwalk multiple times a week in search of different species of birds. While views of the marsh are nice, another portion of the boardwalks slices through a Mangrove Swamp then ends at the Laguna Madre Bay.

Where the boardwalk ends is a great spot for seeing multitudes of birds especially during low tide. Found here are many birds associated with the salt water shorelines and flats as well as freshwater species since the freshwater ponds are discharging into the sea water here as well.

While the boardwalk isn’t very long we will often spend an hour or more just checking out the sights while taking photographs of our favorites. I’ll probably ask Sharon to pen a blog about this trail as well so she can share some of her favorite photos taken here.

NOTE: We are currently in South Padre Island TX until March 1st…

Is Covid still screwing up your plans…?

We are back in the Rio Grande Valley for the winter. To celebrate we broke out the crystal and toasted to a hopefully good winter stay. We stayed at Isla Blanca RV Park last winter while were hiding out from Covid. We were also able to have our first two Covid vaccines here. Last year everything was shut down pretty tightly and thus it was a great location for us to ride out the unknowns of the Covid pandemic.

Fast forward a year later and nothing much has changed on the Covid front. We wanted to stay at Isla Blanca again hoping to be able to see what it was like to be here without a pandemic but alas, not much has changed, at least not for us. While many here in Texas have grown tired of the pandemic Sharon and I still respect the might of Covid and are staying pretty close to home.

That said we do have a few outdoor places we have enjoyed, as we did last year. We often hike at the Convention Center’s Laguna Madre Nature Trail and we often visit the deck at South Padre Island Brewing Company. Before the omicron variant of Covid hit the USA we were just beginning to feel pretty comfortable visiting some indoor places and being around a lot of people.

However, when the omicron variant reared its ugly head and proved to be much more contagious we began to retreat from both indoor places and people once again. Therefore here we are in South Padre Island one year later doing basically the same things we did last year when things were much more unknown.

While some will say we are crazy not to just live our lives and not worry about getting another version of the “flu” we have different feelings. While we both realize the disease is not extremely deadly it is the fear of having the symptoms for a lengthy period of time as the many who now have Long Covid. In addition, Sharon’s having survived breast cancer along with several previous bouts of pneumonia over the years have her really wanting to avoid covid.

I actually can't imagine what it would be like to not be able to smell or taste. So much of our lives revolve around food, drinks and the culinary delights in the many towns we visit. We both can’t even imagine not being able to enjoy two of our precious senses. That alone is enough for me not to take any unnecessary risks.

In the meantime we are enjoying our daily routine of walking the beach together  (weather permitting). so the photos today will be of some of the delights we see with our eyes and enjoy with our ears. Two other senses we value greatly…

NOTE: We are currently in South Padre Island TX until March 1st…