Padre Island is an ideal winter haven for birds ... and tourists.
Great migrations of birds darken the sky on their way to Padre Island and the surrounding winter refuge area. Here you can watch stately, elegantly attired families; noisy, rollicking, irresponsible marauders; lovely, comical, natives and foreigners. Most of those that inhabit the Laguna Madre area are members of the wading tribe; dainty snowy egrets, graceful black and white stilts, dignified blue herons, reddish egrets, clownish Louisiana herons, fat, bell-mouthed pelicans, laughing gulls. More than a hundred different species may be seen here during the course of a year.
Snowy egrets dine delicately on small fish; stilts, in their tuxedo dress, are endlessly predatory. Great blue herons that stand knee deep, statuesque and immobile for hours, suddenly slash out their javelin-like beaks to come up with a silvery mullet. Louisiana herons dart ridiculously across the shallows. Along the shoreline scamper the kildeers, while a reddish egret seems to dance off his enthusiasm to ballet tunes. Formations of white pelicans chase tiny fish across the shallow water. It is surprising to see the apparently awkward brown pelicans dive like efficient machines. West Indian Negroes claim they have seen these birds seize fish six or eight feet under water. Soaring with what seems like a single wingbeat against the sky, the gulls and terns, airy wanderers all, shed their earthbound clumsiness to marvelously graceful flight.
During May, June and July, the serious business of housekeeping begins. The birds begin to prepare for nesting to put on gaudy plumage or handsome wedding garments. They temporarily abandon the heavens. With noisy disharmony, they act out one of nature’s greatest dramas, the perpetuation of the species. On Padre itself, and on small nearby islands in the Laguna, as well as in certain areas along the coast of the mainland, they nest side by side and squawk and squabble as they raise their young.
One’s first sight of such a nesting place is a vivid experience. On the sand and shell of the beach lie the speckled eggs of shearwaters and terns. In the low-growing brush are nests of ibis, egrets, spoonbills and herons. Pelicans pick the more open portions of the islands to hatch their young in nests that are little more than flattened places in the grass. When flying into these areas in a small plane, as research workers often do, birds retreat in stampedes.