The Valley

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We made it to the Valley! Not really meaning to, but it was fun to stay a few nights there since I've heard about it for years!
We had to hit Brownsville since it's so close to being the most southern city in Texas! We only stayed a few hours to see the highly rated Gladys Porter zoo before we drove to our rv resort in Mission, TX.

The zoo was neat, not as good as others I've been to but It had a nice layout with some unique animals, my favorite part was seeing the Australian animals! I didn't get many good photos here.

So in Mission, we joined all the winter Texans near one of the nine World Birding centers(Bentsen Rio Grande state park)! We were definitely the youngest visitors there, haha, but we had a great time with everybody! They were all very welcoming!
The state park there is only open to day visitors, all the rv camping is I'm rv parks on the incoming road. We got to stay at a rv resort that was loaded with amenities! So fun! We could literally walk to the birding center each day, one day we borrowed bikes from the resort and biked around the park.
I was concerned that we wouldn't be able to see any birds but boy was I wrong! The park had bird feeder areas and blinds set up with lovely areas with swings and benches for your bird watching pleasure! We saw lots of Green jays, great kiskadee(which sound like mewing kittens), plain chacalacas(which means "too chatty"), roadrunner, Orioles, red tailed Hawks, Harris Hawks, rough legged Hawks, and perigrine falcon. We met a very informative park ranger that knew a lot of info on the area and animals of Mexico and south US. He said we came when the Hawks had just migrated through and the few remaining ones were scaring all the little birds into hiding so we weren't able to see many small birds. I thought we saw a lot more little birds than I expected and I love seeing and identifying the Hawks, so I was a happy camper! Lol.
With my phone I wasn't able to get close enough to the birds, Philip got some great photos on the big camera, hopefully I can add those later on.

We are now almost to Seminole Canyon state park, was a 6 hr drive along the U.S./ Mexico border. So far we've driven through 3 check points! At times we can see over the rio grande into Mexico!

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Photos

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Thankfully, back in the early 70's, zoos took on this approach when designing animal exhibits, it was a wonderful new way to design zoos, but unfortunately this zoo hasn't progressed much since it was created.

Falcon state park
On our way to Seminole canyon we saw this one, have to stop of course!

Found it!
The horizon behind us is Mexico!