After spending about half a day at
Bentsen State Park we headed up to
Edinburg to stay the night.
Edinburg is basically a suburb of
McAllen, Texas and was near to the park where we had planned to spend our Thursday.
Edinburg also had a small park that was a part of the World
Birding Center, The
Edinburg Scenic Wetlands.
The
Edinburg Scenic Wetlands was the first World Birding Center location to officially open back in 2003. It is a forty acre park set in the middle of residential
Edinburg. The majority of the park consists of two roughly rectangular holding ponds. Trails and viewing blinds are situated around the ponds.
These ponds draw all sorts of
birds to the park. We saw numerous different types of shorebirds, such as spotted
sandpipers,
willet and black-necked stilts, as pictured above.
There was also plenty of waterfowl like northern
shovelers, cinnamon teal, and least grebe. The least grebe is a south Texas specialty, the only place in the US that you can find these birds. We had seen them at a couple of other locations earlier in the trip but we got our best looks at
Edinburg. This was a life bird for us.
In between the two ponds they have a large butterfly garden and a dragonfly pool. I was
eager to check out the dragonfly pool
unfortunately it was not dragonfly season while we were down in Texas.
They also had a
beautiful state of the art visitors center. Inside they had a gift shop,
exhibits, learning areas, and plenty of windows to look out at the park. I noticed that the windows were not very reflective and they had wires and other objects placed over them to help keep birds from flying into them.
They also had several hummingbird feeders at the visitors center which
attracted another south Texas specialty
the buff-bellied hummingbird. This was another life bird for us.
Here in Minnesota we are not really known for our diversity in hummingbird species. The only species that we commonly see during the warmer parts of the year is the ruby-throated hummer. That is why I was excited to see a buff-bellied hummer when we were down in Texas a couple of years back. The buff-bellied hummer is one of the least common humming birds found in the United States. They are usually only found around the western gulf coast. They are also found on the east coast of Mexico and parts of Central America.
