Bird Watching on the Rio Grande
I drove to Mission, Texas, which sits smack dab on the U.S.-Mexico border on March 12th, the same day CNN released a video in which their reporters purportedly stumbled across dozens of migrants crossing the Rio Grande in a raft guided by a masked coyote. The hashtag #bordercrisis was already trending, pushed by right-wing outlets like The Epoch Times, as well as GOP pundits and politicians. Right-wingers had been circulating another video — almost identical to the one aired by CNN — which was originally posted March 11th. Evidence suggests that both videos were set-ups, rigged by border patrol to justify more funding. But all of this was incidental to my trip, planned the previous week, and none of it deterred me.
I was headed south for some much needed time to myself after a year of pandemic-style family time — time to hike and kayak and to see my friend Marianna, who had offered to take me birdwatching on the Rio Grande. I had not spent any amount of time on that river since 2007, and I was excited!
Marianna and her husband, Matt, picked me up from Oleander Acres where I was staying in an Airbnb around 10 a.m. on Sunday morning, March 15th. Once loaded up, we launched from Chimney RV Park and headed southeast toward Hidalgo on the U.S. side and Reynosa on the Mexico side.
Not long after we launched, the wind rose, the clouds darkened, and it began to rain. Matt decided to dock at Father Roy’s summer camp, a grassy clearing with a rickety wooden observation tower, two brightly painted old trailers, and a large statue of the Virgin Mary. The Holy Mother, her face painted a medium brown, looked down at me compassionately as a border patrol helicopter appeared overhead. Our presence had been detected, Marianna said, by sensors strung along the U.S. side of the riverbank like a miles-long tripwire. The helicopter, which had arrived within five minutes of our landing, circled low a few more times and veered away.
As soon as the rain let up and we started down the river again, Matt began to spot an amazing variety of birds — Ringed, Belted, and Green Kingfishers; Wild Turkeys; a lovely pair of Night Herons with soft, blue-gray plumage, amber eyes, and lemon yellow legs and feet; Great Blue and Green Herons; Crested Cormorants; Caracaras, the national bird of Mexico; Model Ducks; Green Jays, Osprey; American Couts, or “Jesus birds” for the way they seem to walk on water; Kingbirds; Olive and Lincoln’s Sparrows, and a Northern Harrier Hawk, in the distance.
We even glimpsed one of the notoriously elusive Sora Rails, which Matt called forth from the underbrush by tapping a coin rhythmically on the boat rail — tap, tap, tap…tap.
In addition to wildlife, we saw at least half a dozen border patrol helicopters; three border patrol boats all bunched together, the agents talking and laughing loudly (all the better to catch unsuspecting migrants, I suppose); and a number of border patrol trucks parked alongside the river with National Guard troops sitting inside. We also encountered a low-slung black gunboat with machine guns mounted fore and aft. It did not look like any other boat I had seen on the river. The three men onboard wore camo fatigues, face masks, and sunglasses. They were not laughing.
The only other people we saw on the trip out were on the Mexican side — men working on the grounds of one of the lavish mansions that line the river or families fishing or washing clothes. I smiled and waved in exaggerated gestures of friendship, and they smiled and waved back.
During the six plus hours we were on the river, the only creatures I saw crossing were birds and a Plain-Bellied Water Snake, its narrow black body undulating gracefully. I saw no humans crossing or attempting to cross, despite the fact that the cloud cover offered the kind of low-visibility conditions that might have made crossing undetected easier.
I did see a number of limp rafts — at least half a dozen — washed up along the riverbank, as well as a pair of fluorescent lifejackets bobbing among the reeds by the shore. Even more haunting was the sight of a baby doll hung from the branches of a tree somewhere between Mission and Hidalgo. The doll was suspended by the neck from a frayed rope. She wore a ruffled white dress, but her doll’s feet with their tiny, molded toes were bare. Marianna said that they had seen several other dolls suspended in this way from branches overhanging the river, but she did not know their significance. A curandero’s good luck charm? A signal? A warning? Brujeria?
On the way back, we passed the doomed stretch of border wall built by Steve Bannon and Brian Kolfage via a fundraising campaign called “We Build the Wall.” Both men were arrested for funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the funds raised for their own personal use. I call this wall “doomed” because it was built on the edge of a river bank that is already eroding out from under it. I give it a year — maybe two — before it topples into the water, creating a huge mess for American taxpayers to clean up.
On the bank directly opposite the ill-fated gray wall, Mexican families grilled, picnicked, fished, and played games with their children. There was a colorful donkey-shaped piñata and even a mariachi band playing in a pavilion. From where I sat on the Rio Grande, the contrast could not have been starker, and it made me sad — and a little ashamed — for my country.
Is there a crisis on our southern border? No. The Border Patrol’s own statistics suggest that while there has been a marked increase in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing so far this year, as there was in 2014, the number of migrants crossing our southern border ebbs and flows. According to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, 303,916 migrants were apprehended trying to cross the border in 2017; while in 2019, a whopping 851,508 were apprehended. Numbers in most years fall somewhere between. And as the Washington Post recently noted, the number of migrants crossing increases annually at this time of year. The fact is people have been moving north to south and south to north throughout the Americas since humans first arrived here around 33,000 years ago. And this migration, like the annual migration of birds and butterflies, will continue. It only becomes a crisis when we fail to respond competently and compassionately.
