Bentsen-Rio Grande: Where the Tropics Reach Texas
Near Mcallen, Texas
On January twenty-eighth, nineteen forty-four, Lloyd M. Bentsen Sr., his wife Edna Ruth, and Elmer and Marie Bentsen donated five hundred eighty-six acres of land along the Rio Grande to the State Parks Board for a nature habitat. The price was one dollar. The requirement was that it be used for the public.
The Bentsen family were McAllen ranchers and businessmen. Lloyd Sr.'s son, Lloyd Bentsen Jr., would go on to serve as a United States senator from Texas and as Treasury Secretary. But the donation they made in nineteen forty-four was simpler in motivation: the land along the river was exceptional, and they wanted it preserved.
It was exceptional because the lower Rio Grande Valley sits at a biological crossroads unlike any other in North America. The tropics push north through Mexico and reach their furthest extent here, in the thorn forests and riparian corridors of the Valley. Species that appear nowhere else in the United States occur here regularly: the green jay, the great kiskadee, the Altamira oriole, the ringed kingfisher, the plain chachalaca. More than three hundred twenty-five bird species and more than two hundred fifty butterfly species have been recorded in the park alone.
In two thousand four, the park became the headquarters of the World Birding Center, a network of nine parks extending a hundred twenty miles across the Valley. Vehicular traffic was banned inside Bentsen-Rio Grande from that point, replaced by a tram and bicycle system. The change was not universally welcomed, but it made the park quieter, and quiet is what birds require.
The ocelot, a spotted wild cat that once ranged widely across South Texas, now survives in Texas in numbers estimated between fifty and eighty individuals, most of them in the Valley. The habitat that the Bentsen donation preserved is part of what those cats still have.
