Choose South Padre Island for beaches, and wildlife delivers a bonus

By: Story and photos by MARY ELLEN BOTTER Travel Editor

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas – "Woo, woo, woo, woo," Scarlet Colley calls in a high-pitched voice. "Oh, hello, bay-BEES. Come say hello."

And like children to a parent, a pod of cloud-gray bottlenose dolphins swims toward her idling boat.

"Hi, my darlings," she coos as they twist and spin in the water. "Oh, I
love you so much."

Come to nature at South Padre Island, and nature comes to you. This
playground for spring breakers is more than its beaches and surf. It's also
one of the nation's finest birding spots, and its bay and the adjacent
Brownsville Shipping Channel are the swimming pool for five families of
dolphins, each with about 25 members.

Over the 14 years that Scarlet has visited them with her dolphin and
birding tours, they have developed so special a relationship with her that
she's often referred to simply as "the lady who speaks to dolphins."

She doesn't touch them, doesn't feed them, doesn't swim with them, and
neither do the visitors she takes to meet her "children." But when she
calls, if they hear her voice, they come.

Among her favorites – frisky boys all – are Ponga, whom she's known
since he was born; Nicki; Angel; Propscar, Angel's big brother; Cody;
and many others she recognizes on sight. Living in water sometimes just
4 feet deep and clean but clouded with sediment, the tribe has adapted to
depend more heavily on echolocation than open-ocean dolphins do.
Along the way, the Padre mammals became their own subspecies, carrying DNA unique to their families, Scarlet says.

But the dolphins are just the appetizer this November morning. The Skimmer 2 is carrying a small group from the dock at Port Isabel to see wintering birds in the channel and in South Bay. In nearly three hours, we'll roam just eight miles, but like the obliging dolphins, birds will be all around us.

South Padre Island and its surrounding waters are a first U.S. stop for tens of thousands of birds migrating northward in spring and a last look at Texas as migrants flap southward in fall toward Mexico and Central and
South America. It's on the Central Flyway, an avian interstate so renowned that bird-watchers come from around the world to train binoculars on the travelers. Summer offers sun and ample food for nesting species. In winter, throngs of shorebirds and seabirds take up residence in South Padre's mild climate.

"Winter is absolutely the ultimate," Scarlet says. Warm days, minimal storms and birds, birds, birds.

Brown pelicans squat on pilings along our course. White pelicans – "my swans," Scarlet says – wing overhead. Everywhere, there seem to be birds:

Tri-colored heron, laughing gulls, long-billed curlew, osprey...

Scarlet noses the shallow-draft Skimmer onto a mud bank and cuts the engine.

"The birds don't seem to mind the boat," she says.

Indeed, walking within feet of us are oystercatchers with their bodacious red-orange beaks, dozens of sandpipers probing the muck and a great blue heron standing as upright and still as the reeds that camouflage it. Scarlet teaches us memory cues to differentiate the several kinds of sandpipers we see.

She has identification tips (she calls them "diddies") for many of the bird species, and like Scarlet, they're helpful and good-humored. Oystercatchers wear "pink nurses' stockings"; tricolored herons, "white bloomers" that set them apart from little blue herons. The red-beaked Caspian tern looks "like a woman with too much lipstick." And the royal tern has a receding, "Prince Charles" hairline.

Wood storks, reddish heron, Franklin's gulls, marbled godwit...

Western sandpipers in formation turn as one, and sunlight glints off their wings. Like small fists pumping out of the bay, the heads of green sea turtles pop up for air. A black skimmer, what Scarlet calls the "Texas puffin," flies low over the water, its lower beak open to scoop small fish at the surface.

Ruddy turnstones, whimbrel, pintails, buffleheads, spotted sandpiper...

Ahead, birds appear to be walking on water. They aren't saints. It's an illusion of the low tide. They're roosting and feeding on a sandbar so near water level that it seems to be submerged. We idle and study the subtle differences among the smaller pipers.

It isn't unusual to see 45 species on an excursion, Scarlet says. And Padre Island itself adds to the joyous frenzy of sightings.

More than 300 species of birds have visited Padre, and surprise guests such as March's black-headed siskin, blue bunting and purple sandpiper keep that number in flux.

The island, its bay, marshes, mudflats, brush and beaches are the eastern anchor of the World Birding Center, a corridor of nine prime observation sites along 120 miles of U.S. Highway 83 in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Visitor centers are open at all but two sites, Harlingen and Padre Island. At Padre, construction has been all but halted by last summer's direct strike by Hurricane Dolly and the long wait for an insurance payout.

But the Laguna Madre Nature Trail adjacent to the building site is open and productive. The boardwalk begins at the side of the convention center and passes through marsh where secretive rails hide among the grasses.

This walkway will join a boardwalk at the birding center when it opens, offering a raised path nearly two-thirds of a mile long, says Cate Ball, manager of the South Padre Island Birding & Nature Center. An observation tower, exhibits and a shop will be included in the center, which will be geared to beginning birders and families, she says.

The nature trail angles toward tidal flats where shorebirds poke into the mud looking for crustaceans or other morsels.

Cate joins me on a short drive to the wooded lots flanking Sheepshead Street. In every season, birders prop their elbows on the rail fences, steady their binoculars and scan the bushes and branches for songbirds or other species sheltering or feeding in the greenery. The postage stamp-size preserve is a project of the Valley Land Fund.

Wind and a too-short stay keep me from the bird-rich jetties at Isla Blanca County Park on Padre's far western end, but this gives me time to visit the nonprofit Sea Turtle Rescue Center, a hospital for sick or injured turtles. Several species lay eggs on Padre, migrate past the island or paddle in surrounding waters. Working with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the rescue center treats reptiles that run afoul of fishing nets or boats, ingest marine debris, become diseased or are stunned by cold weather. Where possible, the turtles are released after recovery.

Green and hawksbill turtles are most common in the tanks at the center, and tours are offered. Or information boards at the tanks enable independent touring. Nobody puts a hand into the water; these guys bite. But the curious animals circle the tanks, often pausing to look out at the curious people looking in.

I've promised myself one last, quick stop on the drive back to my flight at the Harlingen airport.

Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, about 40 minutes from Padre Island, is known as a supermarket of wildlife, but what I want – what I hope for – is to see a green jay, one of 413 bird species the sanctuary has tallied. A washboard road ends at the visitor center, and I'm all eyes.

I don't even reach the door before a raucous call and a flash of clownish colors – electric blue, shoe-polish black, lemon yellow, lime green, light olive – precede a thump on a feeding station that makes my wish come true.

The bird, found in the U.S. only here in the lower Rio Grande Valley, is scolding me.

I accept the beak-lashing, then nearly two-step with joy into the center. I can't wipe the grin off my face. I can't believe it was that easy.

But then, I should have guessed it would be. "Half the nation's birds come here," says volunteer Geri Hamilton.

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