>Constance,
>I really enjoyed your description of your trip to Harlingen that
>you posted on Tweeters. I have a question...how did you hear about this
>festival? Does it go on every year?
>Robert Cleland


Dear Robert,
The Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival has been held
in Harlingen every November for 4 years. It is
sponsored mostly by the Harlingen Chamber of Commerce,
but my impression is that local birders put in a lot of
volunteer time to make everything work. They are led by
Father Tom Pincelli (you can read about him in Pete Dunn's
book, The Feather Quest (pp 71 ff). He truly is kindness
itself, as patient with hard-core listers as he is with
raw beginners and even scientists. To get information
you can write to the RGV Birding Festival, PO Box 3162,
Harlingen, TX 78551-3162; phone 956-423-5440; e-mail
tbortness at harlingen.com; or web site
http://nature.harlingen.com.

The festival this year lasted from Nov. 12 - 16. Every
morning charter buses drove to hot spots such as Laguna
Atascosa, Santa Ana NWR, Bentsen and the King Ranch,
as well as sites on private lands in Salineno and
Chapeno. The buses were staffed by two guides. Most trips
were ridiculously cheap, on average $10.

In the afternoons and evenings, there were lectures and
workshops, some on basic ID tricks for difficult groups
such as sparrows, and even some for artists and photographers.

The civic auditorium was the main headquarters and included
booths from various suppliers (binoc manufacturers,
t-shirt artists, booksellers, etc.).

The festival operators displayed a giant list showing
all the birds seen by participants during the 5 days.
I think the final count was 169. It was the sort of
list to bring you glee (I saw that too) and envy (how
I wished I'd seen that one).

For me the festival was great, not because I could
ride buses with 40 other birders and talk about nothing
but birds. I did do that once, on the trip to private
lands around Salineno. But I found that I disliked being
led by experts who would point out and identify new
birds before I could laboriously go through a bird's field
marks and take a guess myself. The guides were certainly
experts, but they made lifers too easy for my taste.
What I really enjoyed more was to go off by myself or
with one or two new friends and make discoveries on my
own. That is how I saw the Mexican Crow (slogging a
quarter mile through mud at the Brownsville Dump,
mud so sticky you couldn't let yourself think about
WHY it was sticky or you'd turn back). That is also
how I saw the Aplomado Falcons, one perched boldly
in a yucca plant beside the road, not 20 yds away,
and the other perched just as conspicuously on a fence
post farther away. I had been told that the falcons
like to perch at midlevel, not high - even when they
have a higher perch available, they will stay around
head-height.

Anyway, I felt very comfortable going around on my own
because so many other birders were also afield. I don't
think I would have ventured alone into such an area
otherwise. It did feel iffy at times. I saw many many
Border Patrol cops, and most houses had heavily barred
windows. Further, one of the parks, Bentsen, has a rep
for having a trail where drug runners can cross the
river safely. I asked Stuart McKay about this before
I left, and he said he wouldn't feel threatened, mostly
because birders are observant folks and would probably
spot danger before danger spotted us. Of course, Stuart
is over 6 feet tall.... At any rate, I did go down that
trail a few miles and had begun to feel kinda stupid,
when luckily I heard a flock of small boys crashing down
the trail behind me. All I had to do then was walk fast
enough to stay ahead of them, since I knew no bird would
stay around long with all their din but then neither would
any drug people. Using all my stamina, I managed to huff
and puff along for quite a ways until the boys caught
up with me. By then I was so out of breath I was ready
to turn back. Of course by then I had also seen the
Gray Hawk.