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The Chachalaca Trail
At Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge
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We showed up later in the afternoon to the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in Alamo, Texas and didn’t realize just how big this place was. It is sad because it is quite a drive from where we are camping so I don’t know if we will make it back to explore some of the other trails.
If you collect National Park stickers and cancellations this cancels out two of them. Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge and the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The Annual National Park Pass gets you in for free.
There is a trolley tour that drives you around a seven mile loop that leaves at 10:00 am, 12:00 pm, and 2:00 pm. We missed that also by showing up after 3:00 pm. I might try to find a day when we can drive back down and be there early in the day.
We chose the shortest trail to be on the safe side since they closed at sunset. The Chachalaca Trail is only a half mile long. It starts near the visitor center and circles right back around to the same hub where it began. Five different trails branch off from this same hub.
The Chachalaca is a small bird found in the southern-most part of Texas in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and on down into Mexico. We heard that it makes a loud ear-splitting call early in the morning, but only during breeding season which is February and March. We were there in mid-January, so I guess we missed it.
This is an easy trail directly to Willow Lake. The first stop is a wooden observation deck overlooking the lake. There were a lot of birds in the water.
