Good Birds, Bobcats, Snakes

Today we were back at Bentsen State Park near Mission TX, where we were hoping to stumble onto the Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl reported earlier. We worked the trails carefully, but the owl was not to be ours. We did see again the Rose-throated Becard (photo), Altamira Oriole (photo), and Clay-colored Thrush (photo) plus many other birds. New birds for the day included Gray Hawk, Greater Roadrunner, Verdin, Black-headed Grosbeak, and Indigo Bunting. But the main attractions were the other critters like the two Bobcats, one of which I barely caught with my camera (photo) and the other got away. And like the Indigo Snake which looks like a giant Black Rat Snake, this individual being over six feet long.  And like the green iguanid hanging onto a mesquite tree. Of course there were also the Collared Peccaries that hung out around the feeders, including the one tiny piglet, but they didn't seem very wild.
In the afternoon we made a run to the La Sal del Ray tract of the Lower Rio Grande Valley NWR north of Edinburg TX. This is an area where Dorie Stolley, former Back Bay and Eastern Shore NWR biologist, did some field work before coming to Tidewater. We got a bit confused about where the entrances were, so we had very little time and didn't get the good view of the shorebirds we came to see. We did, however, see Lark Sparrows, Western Meadowlarks (a challenge to tell from Eastern in winter when not calling), Harris's Hawks, White-tailed Hawks, Crested Caracaras, and our first Pyrruloxia.
The total species list now stands at 237.