Add These to Your Harlingen, TX List of Things to Do

Harlingen, TX.      High: 76.     Low: 52    

You gotta visit Hugh Ramsey Nature Park more than one time while in Harlingen, TX. It's not the prettiest park. But it is a nature park with bird blinds, water, ponds, and narrative signage. Unfortunately, everything looks dead and dreary in it right now, except for the colorful birds flying around. It has a lot of trash along the river, the cactus suffered greatly in the 2021 freeze last week and a lot of them died. There are a LOT of big piles of dead branches/brush everywhere, and a couple of the bird blinds are in very bad shape. The park is struggling to keep up with maintenance, but every time Sparky goes, there are a lot of families there, so it's a much used and loved park with birders. Best time to go is during the week and early in the day. Look what Sparky saw this time!  A beautiful red cardinal, a yucca plant blooming, a rufous hummingbird, and a green jay. 

Oh! Almost forgot! Some chachalacas, a common Texas bird, (Sparky just loves to say that bird species name!) plus more javelinas! (see previous post for photos of the chachalacas and javelinas.)

art trail map

Be sure to see South Padre Island. This year, the island hosted an art trail with art galleries AND the Turtle Trail and the Sandcastle Trail. You get a map at the visitor's center on the island, and if you find all the turtle sculptures (10?) on the island and report back to the visitor's center with photos of each one and post on social media, they will give you a free tee shirt (if they haven't run out yet). So, off we went to see the turtle sculptures and a few sandcastles along the way. It was a really cool and windy day today, so we didn't stay long on the island. It started out in the low seventies, and by the time we got to the island, the temperature had dropped to 57 degrees! Yesterday, it was 87 for the high!

Once you've located the turtles with their cool stories about their names, the theme the artist was going for and the sandcastles, then be sure to stop by and see the wonderful Wyland's Whaling Wall at the South Padre Island Convention Center. (shown in the center photo). It's 4 miles north of the causeway. This is the Detroit artist Robert Wyland's #53 (out of 100), "Orcas off the Gulf of Mexico", and is the only one by this artist in the area. It takes up three sides of the convention center's walls, is 153 feet long and 23 feet high. Wyland paints enormous outdoor murals to draw attention to the dangers marine mammals face in the wild. This particular mural has a lot of species on it--the Orca, Yellowfin Tuna, Tarpon, Loggerhead Sea Turtle, King Mackerel, Red Snapper, Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, Kemps Ridley Sea Turtle, brown pelicans, and more.

After living in SW Florida for seven years and experiencing the white crystal sands of Siesta Key and local area beaches, the brown sand here was a little bit of a letdown. BUT--clever smaller sand sculptures all over town made a dreary March day much more fun as we drove around trying to find the turtles and the sandcastles.

Sparky was tempted to try and get Eldo to stop at Kelly's Irish Pub, it's almost St. Patty's Day, you know, but we will save that for another time...

We will be exploring more refuges in the near future...Stick around if you like that sort of thing! If you're a foodie, Sparky has got you covered, too. We are sampling some of the local cuisine before we report on that. (Uh-oh...there goes the food budget, worries E.) But hey, that's part of the fun traveling and using a camping membership. You can try a few more eateries in the process of saving money at campgrounds! (Sigh...Sparky's logical process needs a little fine tuning, thinks Eldo.). Bye for now!

More Things to do in Harlingen, Texas Area

We were driving around town one day running errands and saw a HUGE flock of birds/ducks at a local park, Pendleton Park in Harlingen. Sparky got all excited..."ELDY!! We have to stop at this park! Look at all those birds/ducks/wildlife!" He gamely pulls over into the park and prepares to sit for awhile so Sparky can capture some photos.

Black bellied whistling ducks

 It was one of the largest flocks of  black bellied whistling ducks Sparky had ever seen. This is their hangout here in Harlingen. (How'd you like all that alliteration?! The teacher in me can't help myself) There must have been almost a hundred, and they were whistling to beat the band, haha! It sounds just like a whole bunch of bad whistlers, lol....Not sure if they were looking for a mate, taking a migratory break, or if they are here all the time, but they were all around the pond in droves at Pendleton Park. They are a cool looking species. They rest on one leg. These each have a leg tucked up under their feathers. You'd think they'd get really tired just standing on one leg!

Another cool species we saw at the same park was the Muscovy duck. It's the only domestic duck not descended from mallards. These strange, warty faced male ducks are the largest duck in North America. When they are young, they are considered good eating! They've been around for a very long time. The Aztec rulers wore cloaks made from their feathers. You can see why in the photo below.

A mother's got to love this face, right?

On another day, we headed out to Bentsen Palms State Park, in Mission, TX. It was about an hour's drive. We just wanted to check it out and as we got there later in the afternoon, we saw that there was a

lot more to explore than in just a day. There are nice trails there of short duration, anywhere from under a mile to a couple of miles. There are bird blinds and trails that seem to attract certain species. We saw a green jay just a few minutes after paying our 5.00 entry fee! What a gorgeous SW Texas bird! Sparky is having all kinds of problems with the focus on her Nikon Coolpix point and shoot 950 camera. It won't focus despite lots of different efforts to fix the problem and beyond the obvious ones like make sure it's on autofocus, or do a factory reset and try all kinds of different settings. It's still under warranty, so it's going back to the factory. The first five months, it worked great! Sparky managed to catch the cardinal before we headed over to another part of the park.

We are going to head back with our bikes soon. There's a butterfly center just down the road from the park as well. We will report back on that soon. We'd like to say we have all our ducks in a row, but when you are RVing, there's always something else that is going to pop up to change your plans.

One of those things was we got to get our vaccinations so now we will be spending an extra week added onto our three week stay here in Harlingen. 

Eldy had been watching and registering us everywhere he could think of, and we were beginning to think we were in RV No Man's Land for a vaccination--not a Texas resident but here for the winter in Texas, Florida resident but not in Florida. UNTIL---he got a news article on his phone saying that a pop up clinic was opening up in Harlingen yesterday. It started at 8:00 AM. You had to come in and get a wristband. There were 1,000 allotted. You get a wristband, you get to get vaccinated THE NEXT DAY. It was about 2:30 when he saw the news article. No way, there's probably not going to be any left. BUT--Eldo doesn't give up that easily. He called the city health department THREE times to find out if they had any left. He got through on the third try. They had a few left, they said. We boogied over there, got in line, and they shut down the line RIGHT AFTER US. Sparky was #999, Eldo was #1,000. We were able to be vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine. Four weeks from now, we go back. So-o-o-o...with all this extra time in the valley, we should know the area pretty well by the time we get ready to leave in late March...Stick around, there'll be more to share! We love having you along for the ride, wherever we go....Thank you for reading!

Things to do in Harlingen, TX

We always stop at a the visitor's center to get info wherever we go. We talk to others at our park and find out local eating places, places of interest, and then make a list of things we'd like to do. We stopped at the visitors' center in Harlingen, and Sparky scooped up bags of info on different areas in Texas. (Eldo heaves a big sigh here....it's a lot of brochures and heavy paper!) Here's the first stop on our list, lots more things to do coming soon in the blog. 

Hugh Ramsey Nature Park. A fellow park resident told us he saw javelinas (have-a-leen-as) and there are bird blinds and feeders there. We hit the jackpot within two minutes of arriving there and starting down the first path...a bird blind right away, a half a dozen javelinas, AND tons of birds flitting and flying around. 

A javelina is similar to a wild boar, and NOT a pig, although they resemble one. They are also known as a collard peccary, you can see why! They weigh 40-60 pounds and stand about 20" tall. They have poor eyesight but a good sense of smell. They have scent glands on their backs and rub against each other resulting in a "herd" smell, so they can identify their social group. They are usually in groups of 6-12. People say you can often smell them before you see them as they have a strong musky smell. (We didn't smell anything!) They can be aggressive if babies are near, so be careful if you see them! 

The bird feeders were exceptionally active the day we visited.

"Harry, is that you?"

We saw cardinals, hummingbirds, sparrows, and we think warblers....This little guy landed on the hummingbird feeder, but didn't partake.

We also saw a large bird that we found out was a chachalaca. It's a tropical, long tailed chicken-like bird. They are common in this area, love thickets and brush, and walk along the branches of trees. They are a tree loving bird rather than a ground bird. They can make quite the ruckus, too! They are kind of a weather predictor, they kick up a fuss when the weather is going to change or a storm is approaching.

(The name of this bird makes Sparky think of the "Scoop, there it is! Scoop, there it is, shakalaka, shakalaka" chocolate chip cookie dough/insurance commercial. What the heck does ice cream have to do with insurance? Sparky doesn't get it.

Sparky went back a day later, and NADA. NOTHING. No birds at the. feeders, no javelinas. But it IS a really nice park to explore with uneven paths and LOTS of different kinds of cactus that got hit hard by the three day freeze. Dang, those spines are hard and SHARP!

Sparky is in explorer mode. For those of you who read the blog the first time around when we traveled in a motorhome, when Sparky would see something that would catch her eye while traveling, she would yell out, "Eldy--STOP THE CAR! I want to take a photo of__________". Eldo always stops if it's safe to do so, so today, Sparky saw some different ducks in a pond on South Padre Island while we were driving around today. "ELDY! YOU GOTTA STOP THE TRUCK. I SEE SOME COOL DUCKS!" Eldy just rolls his eyes, (No, I don't! he says) but he finds the quickest, safe place to pull over. Isn't he sweet? Sparky had to get a photo of this duck....It's a redheaded duck--that's it. That's the name of it.

The Rio Grand Valley is world renown for birding, we hope to see many more species of birds as we spend more time in the area. It's almost the time of year for spring migration for birds to be returning to the north.  There are several really cool wildlife refuges in the area, we will check them out and get back to you. See you later!