State Park Tram Tour

This morning we enjoyed another part of the state park's "walk off the turkey" program. A naturalist (Jerry Brite) drove us around the park, stopping here and there to introduce us to the birds, mammals, ants, and plants of the Rio Grande Valley.

Some of the birds are very colorful,


like the green jay--













and the fly-catching Kiskadee.



















At some stops we saw more peccaries than birds.









One peccary preferred plumbed water over ground water.















We were joined by another naturalist (Carol) and some college students who were doing a class project providing publicity for the park. Carol was very lively and a trove of information. We observed and noted a great deal that we would never have even noticed had we been alone exploring the park. For example, the peccaries have a musk gland with which they mark their territory, and all the members of the group participate in spreading the scent of the alpha male and female.

We saw harvester ants, whose nests were flat and surrounded by denuded soil. They had trails leading to the trees they were harvesting, and specialized workers snipped the leaves, carried them back to the nest, moved them underground, and arranged them in chambers to grow fungus on. It's actually the fungus that the ants eat.