Big Bend National Park. Fort Davis State Park. 1,700 miles, and we never left Texas. Birds in 15 counties. I have no idea how many birds altogether yet, but I’ll tell you later. County-birds. Year-birds. Lifers. This was a trip about birds and it was very good.
It was a camping trip too. Jon brought the tent. He brought a nice big tent with those long bendy shock-corded poles. I brought a brand-new air mattress that has a built in foot pump for inflation. It worked great. Jon brought a borrowed air mattress with a duct tape patch. He called it his sleep-number bed. Every night he blew it up with a portable electric pump to about a 98. By the next morning it was always about a 2.
We had temperatures ranging from the 100s at Rio Grande Village, with about 90 degrees in the Chisos Basin where we camped the first two nights, to the low 40s in the Davis Mountains in the mornings. Sometimes it was hard to sleep from the heat. It was cool enough to cover up at night in the mountains. We did all the usual camping things. We got caught out on the trail in a thunderstorm. The tent got caught in the thunderstorm too, so that first hot night in the tent could best be described as “swampy”. We spent a night in a windstorm with the tent repeatedly flexing and collapsing on our heads before springing back into position about 800 times. Ungainly javalinas invaded our camp; clattering about on those dainty little hooved feet. A fox walked between our folding chairs. A bear passed within 25 yards of us. Elf Owls called at night in the Basin. Common Poorwills and Western Screech Owls sang from right above our heads in the dark at Fort Davis State Park.
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