Young Snowbirds » birding

Our Review of Sea Breeze RV – Portland, TX

Darlene — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:30:46 +0000

We stayed at Sea Breeze for just over 5 weeks – and we will be back next year! Summarizing our review of Seabreeze RV Park in Portland, we would say that this is a great place to stay. We loved the location, the people, the activities and the area. You’ve already seen the owners and their classic Corvettes on the beach and the RV Olympics, so I’m not going go give too many details as I got an article on the place coming on the Good Sam magazine as well. So I’ll just show some photos of the park to give you an idea of what it was like.

The sign says "Welcome Home" and they mean it.

On a scale of 1-10 we give Sea Breeze full marks – TEN!

Our stall H48

"The Place" clubhouse where events take place

games room - patio

Dora starting off the pot luck for St. Patty's day dinner

Dancers for St. Patty's dinner

I got in on the act and picked up the spoons to play

There are an incredible number and type of birds that hang out in and around the park. Here are a few of them, most of these taken only steps from our door. If you’re into birding in Texas, this is the place to stay.

Blue heron in the creek at the park

Large egret - the littler Snowy Egrets also hang out nearby

Cardinal - I chased this guy around to get a photo of him. He has the neatest song too,

Egret

Ducks of course

Snowy egret

Brown pelicans

6 toed cat (6 on each front paw) - 12 pack as they called him that lives at Sea Breeze

Not a bad view hey?

The lights are from the city, Corpus Christi across the bay

And that marks the end of Texas for this year - cheers!

What We Liked About Seabreeze RV Park

Location – end of a road, next to Nueces Bay opposite Corpus Christi with NO SECURITY because there’s NO NEED for security. 5 minute drive to Shamrock Fitness center, 5 minutes to a movie theater, close to banks and shopping and a short 15 minutes to Corpus.
Birding – Texas is filled with birds and Seabreeze RV Park is no exception. As you see in the pictures above, many different types of birds live in the park and an area between the beach and the RV’s is designed for birds. I tried to convince Otto to put in a par 3 golf course hole here, but he declined. Otto said “That’s the birding area”.
Fishing – although we didn’t fish, our neighbors did. You can walk right out off the beach into the water and cast your line, or drive a short distance and launch your boat. Our neighbor had a boat he used almost daily
Laundry facility had accompanying television area. Can watch TV if you like, while waiting for laundry.
3 places to watch TV. The office (TV, and Pool table), laundry room, and “The Place” with a HUGE flatscreen.
Pool and hot tub
Covered games area offering Foosball, darts (and the pool table at the office)
Large washrooms with showers in 2 different places for a total of 4 showers plus an additional 2 washrooms at the office.
Daily “Happy Hour” at “The Place” where the guys meet to shoot the shit for an hour in the afternoon. Beverages optional.
Morning coffee and “shoot the shit” at The Place, which was always very active.
Every other week potluck suppers
Immediately brought into the social aspect of the park, welcomed with open arms. That was a first for us.
While the owners Otto and Dora don’t actually run the park, they are VERY active in the events. It’s their second home, so we saw them a lot.
We liked that the full timers had their own section of the park. If they went to work early, they didn’t wake other campers.
Vehicle vacuum and tire pump on site.
The ONLY downside of the park is the location of the trash bin. There’s one trash bin located outside the park entrance that fills quickly. One must save trash locally and then take it with you leave, or make a special trip. With it being the only downside, we quickly adapted.
Oh, and the price. It’s so perfect. Was the most affordable park we stayed at in our entire RV history.

Seabreeze RV Park in Portland is far and away the best place we’ve stayed at in our short time on the road. We think that it’s important to be able to call a place home and feel safe there. At Seabreeze, we were welcomed with open arms, included in events immediately and could not have felt safer or had a better view. I hope that our review of seabreeze offers you some insight into making the choice to stay here.

Whooping Crane Birding Tour in Rockport

Rob — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 02:54:40 +0000

Whooping cranes summer in Alberta Canada, just north of where we live, so while we were wintering in Texas in our RV, we thought it appropriate to see where they winter too. We found a Whooping Crane Birding tour in Rockport Texas, so decided to go after our last event in the Seabreeze RV Park Olympic games.

Sandhill cranes in flight

There were so many of them, It was practically a Sandhill crane tour too. These are some sandhill cranes we saw while heading out into the Gulf.

The Wharf Cat

The Wharf Cat and it’s sister ship, the Scat Cat are two very large catamaran boats that operate out of Fishermans Wharf in Port Aransas Texas. They offer day long fishing trips, sunset dolphin tours and from November through March, take birding tours to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge to visit the winter nesting ground of the Whooping Crane.

The whole area of Rockport, Corpus Christi and Portland Texas are great birding tour areas. In port alone we saw seagulls (of course) and many egrets.

Fishermans Wharf

Darlene and I first stumbled upon Fishermans Wharf on our first trip to Port Aransas. As we toured the dock area there, we saw a fishing trip that has just come back. They hooked up and displayed all the fish from the fishing trip aboard the Wharf Cat in front of their sign.

After seeing its sheer size, we knew Dar would feel safe enough to go on a tour. It’s a two level boat, air conditioned, with two heads and a beverage bar inside.

Whooping Crane Tour

We found out that there are two types of tours. One that starts from their location here in Port Aransas, two days a week and the other Whooping Crane tour in Rockport, which leaves three days a week. Basically, the boat has to sail up past the Rockport to get to the Wildlife Refuge, so can begin at either location. We choose the tour in Rockport simply because it would give us less travel time on the boat, and focus squarely on the whooping cranes.

Whooping Cranes

We saw a bunch of different types of seagulls, blue herons, terns, egrets, cormorants, roseate spoonbills, brown and white pelicans, sandhill cranes, dolphins and of course whooping cranes. As I mentioned earlier, it was as much a sandhill crane tour as it was any other bird.

Blue heron in port

... and a moment later, heron in flight

Growing up in small town Saskatchewan, my father was a hunter and taught firearm safety. He did so for over 25 years and I came to appreciate the whooping crane in a whole different way. I recall him having a patch sewn to his coat that displayed “Save the whooping crane” because of its place on the endangered species list. There are said to be only 250 of them left in the wild.

Dar here: from what I remember there are only 3 wild flocks left with this one being the only MIGRATING flock anywhere in the world. So they take good care of these birds to try and ensure their survival. We saw evidence of conservation efforts but unfortunately for the birds, this year was a bad year for their food (the blue crab) so they were having a hard time finding food. That doesn’t bode well for the poor whoopers. Made me not want to eat blue crab ever again.

A pair of whooping cranes in flight as they passed in front of our boat

Imagine our amazement as we neared Matagorda Island and saw two “whooping cranes in flight”, as our birding tour narrator Ray called out on the Wharf Cat’s speaker system. The two cranes flew across the channel in front of our boat and landed in the marsh area about 100 feet from our location. Simply amazing!

The magestic Whooping Crane

Ray our Birding Tour Expert

As a special little treat, and part of our Whooping Crane tour, the Wharf Cat staff provide the services of a professional birder who gives the riders some insight into the birds we’re seeing. Ray was easily in his 70′s and an excellent source of information. We enjoyed Ray’s narration and explanations of what we were seeing or could possibly see. He cracked the odd joke and simply kept us very interested and entertained with our birding tour.

As we headed back to Rockport, we enjoyed the sea breeze and kept our eyes peeled for dolphins. We eventually saw some.

Dar here: Ray also explained how to tell the difference between the sandhill and whooping cranes, as the sandhills are often mistaken for whoopers. The Sandhills do not have the distinctive red patch on their head that the whoopers do, and the whoopers feathers are much whiter as are they larger than the sandhills.

Arriving safely back in Rockport, we chose to drive around the area a bit more stopping in Fulton to see the Fulton Mansion which was closed, and then just to drive along the shoreline. We saw, more birds, of course, pelicans this time. They were off the pier across from the Waters Edge RV Park in Fulton, which we had originally looked at as a possible RV park on the Gulf of Mexico. From what we saw, it looks like a good location and has its own private fishing pier complete with pelicans.

A whooping crane birding tour was not something I had ever thought I’d be doing. The birds were something I grew up knowing about but had never seen. As the cranes migrated from my home province of Alberta, all the way down here to Texas, I thought it fitting that I should take the opportunity for the birding tour. It was a day well spent. We would easily recommend the Wharf Cat tour operators as they were professional, educated and had a good operation going. If you’re in the area and looking for a whooping crane tour, Look them up www.WharfCat.com