San Antonio. Not San Antonio, Texas, but San Antonio, New Mexico. From ten
thousand feet high to five thousand feet high. From thirty degrees to
eighty degrees in one day. The Bosque Birdwatchers Park. An RV Park right
outside the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in a creosote desert.
They have quail. Gamble's quail. Right here in the campground. We get to
listen to that soft muttering and plaintive calling all evening and again in
the morning.
We took a quick drive into the preserve. Quail, pheasant, kingbird,
blackbird, sparrow, finch, roadrunner, ibis, heron, egret, redhead, gadwall,
ruddy, mallard, coot, vulture, swallow, pintail, hummingbird. Warm and
windy. Birds everywhere. A good bird day, all in an hour. A good place to
come back to, but we're headed south this trip. We haven't logged a new
bird in months. This would be a good place to come back to, to try and bag
a new bird. I even have the new bird in mind. I enjoy the gamble's quail
and California quail so much; I picked another quail I want to see. The
scaled quail. They're along the border with Mexico, found in arid
grassland. We looked the entire month of January in Texas for the scaled
quail, but we never found one. We found places they were supposed to be,
but they were never there when we were.
