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Thursday, November 13, 1997

Bird watchers from around the world flock to the Brownsville Landfill

By ROBB TODD / Valley Morning Star

BROWNSVILLE, Texas -- A thousand seagulls swarm above two 65,000-pound Caterpillar compactors that smash 500 tons of garbage daily under their knobby, steel wheels.

And when the garbage trucks arrive at the Brownsville Landfill with more reeking rubbish, pandemonium follows as the screeching birds clash for discarded chicken bones, moldy bread and scraps of animal carcasses.

"You haven't lived until you've seen one of those garbage trucks open its back end and disembowel itself," master composter John Stone said. "These guys that work here could write a book about what they've found. There's everything out here."

But it's not the garbage that makes the 226-acre landfill unique -- it's the Tamaulipas crow.

The bird, which was first recorded in the United States in 1968, was known as the Mexican crow until the American Ornithologists Union recently changed the name to reflect the Mexican state in which it thrives.

And for thousands of avid bird watchers that visit the Rio Grande Valley each year, the Brownsville Landfill is their real destination. Just 2-1/2 miles from the Mexican border, it is the only reliable place in the North America to catch a glimpse of the otherwise common bird.

Beginning Thursday when the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival arrives in Harlingen, hundreds of binocular-clad bird watchers will flock to the landfill and set their scopes on finding the Mexican bird on U.S. soil.

"When someone sees the crow, they'll jump up and yell, ÔOh, my God! Oh, my God!' and then all the cameras will go click-click-click," landfill security supervisor Mario Flores said from behind the steering wheel of his truck as he drove past a 15-foot pile of used tires and a gathering of discarded refrigerators and ovens.

"They act like they won the lottery or something."

Bird watchers are divided into two groups -- those who simply enjoy watching birds and would never want to visit a dump, and the "listers," some of whom buy plane tickets every time there is a rare bird alert 2,000 miles from their home.

Listers keep a "life list" of each bird they have seen. In an effort to check the Tamaulipas crow off their list, bird watchers have flown from Canada, Japan and Europe to visit Brownsville's biggest mound of waste.

"Most birders that have been birding for a long time, and that chase rarities, are used to going to places like that," Carolina Bird Club president Bert Fisher said in a telephone interview from his office in Durham, N.C.

Fisher saw the Tamaulipas crow March 13, 1994, during his first visit to the landfill.

"I heard it and saw it. The voice is very unique," said Fisher, who, when he's not watching birds, is the director of the alumni clubs program at Duke University. "It sounds like a frog croaking. Actually, hearing it is more exciting than seeing it. There's lots of black birds, so there's nothing special about it for a visual effect, but the vocalization is fun."

Fisher, who started watching birds seven years ago, spent an hour at the landfill and saw 12 species. The landfill was one stop on a three-day birding trip in the Rio Grande Valley that included the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, Old Canon Pond, Sabal Palm Audubon Center, Laguna Atascosa, Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park and Salineno.

During that time, Fisher saw 250 species in about 20 hours of birding. But he never would have stopped in Brownsville had it not been for the Tamaulipas crow.

"I do know people who have missed it," Fisher said of the odds of seeing the bird at the landfill. "I think it's weather dependent. But I think it's got to be as high as 70 percent."

Landfill and recycling supervisor Jimmy Rivera disagrees. He guarantees every bird watcher that they will see a Mexican crow when they visit the landfill as long as a painting will suffice when a real crow is not pecking at the garbage.

Rivera commissioned Luis "Wichi" Guevara Jr., to paint a mural of the bird on the side of the scale house.

"It's sort of a trick," joked Rivera, who allows bird watchers to visit the landfill, which opened in 1979, from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. "We're known as Mexican crow Park. At first, my men thought these people were loony, looking up into the sky with binoculars. Now, we even have a big poster of South Texas birds in the scale house."

Five years ago, the dump attracted fines for violating landfill laws as well as the occasional bird watcher. But since Rivera was hired in 1992, the landfill has become one of the state's top five composting facilities.

The landfill is also preserving 13-1/2 acres to apply for certification as a Texas Wildscape, which encourages natural habitation by birds and animals. According to the National Wildlife Federation's Heather Carskaddan, the Brownsville Landfill is unique in its efforts to develop a Texas Wildscape -- an offshoot of the NWF's Backyard Wildlife Habitat program.

"We're trying to be environmentally friendly," Stone said. "And we want to encourage others to do the same."

Brownsville's facility is also unique because no other landfill in the United States is known to regularly attract tourists, according to the Solid Waste Association of North America.

"When you have a Mexican crow, you have to share," Rivera said. "And when people come here, they can't believe they've traveled 2,000 miles from Wisconsin to come to a landfill."

The landfill has a life expectancy of 15 more years. But, by composting lawn clippings and vegetation rather than burying it, Rivera hopes to prolong its life by up to 50 years.

And that is good news for Brownsville's economy because if the Tamaulipas crow vanished from the area, the city might lose most of the $1 million dollars the Brownsville Convention and Visitors Bureau estimates that bird watchers injected into the city's economy last year.

Bird watchers represent the United States' fastest growing outdoor pastime and approximately $20 billion worth of tourism annually.

"If the crow wasn't at the landfill, you wouldn't have more than one or two local birders there," Fisher said. "That's the only reason I went to Brownsville."

Nick Reyna, president of the Brownsville Convention and Visitors Bureau, can relate to that sentiment. During a convention in Toronto last year, he met a man who flew to Brownsville from Canada, took a cab to the landfill, saw the crow, went back to the airport and flew home.

"That was an unusual story," Reyna said. "But he promised to come back and see the rest of the city."

Reyna was promoting the site as the "city dump" but changed the name to the "city landfill" for marketing purposes.

"People said we were promoting garbage," Reyna said. And, as Rivera says, "dump" is a four-letter word.

Rivera estimates that the landfill attracts 2,000 visitors each year. Area bird watching tours and The Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail include stops at the landfill.

"They used to come up in the Port of Brownsville area and they would park on South Port Road and hike about a mile and a half to the site," Rivera said. "Now, we get bus loads at a time."

Bird watchers are escorted down a road adjacent to a sealed cell of refuse, opposite the active cell that attracts the birds. From about 30 yards, bird watchers listen for the Tamaulipas crow's croak and hunt for it with high-powered binoculars.

Rivera said he has seen flocks of 20 to 25 Tamaulipas crows on the trash piles.

While bird watchers have been aware of the dump for about two decades, the recent increase in bird watching's popularity has brought the landfill into a much brighter spotlight.

"Birding in the Valley is relatively new," said Father Tom Pincelli, who writes a weekly birding column called Wing Beat for the Harlingen Valley Morning Star in addition to his duties at St. Anthony's Catholic Church in Harlingen. "It's only in the last few years that we've seen the surge in popularity. Bird watchers were coming down in the early '70s to see the Mexican crow. The Valley has been known to birders as a hot spot long before the residents were aware of it."

A little more than a decade ago, Pincelli took Roger Tory Peterson, considered by many as the father of bird watching, to the landfill. Peterson, the late author of numerous birding books, including "Peterson's Guide to Birds in North America," saw his first Mexican crow on that visit -- No. 701 on his life list.

According to Pincelli, only 10 to 20 people have seen more than 800 species and about 300 to 400 have seen more than 700.

Pincelli, who has 728 species on his life list, moved to the Valley in 1980. He began bird watching in 1972 and was familiar with the area.

"It wasn't a difficult choice when I was asked to come down here," he said. "I knew I was walking into a birder's paradise."

In addition to the Tamaulipas crow, Pincelli said that the Brownsville Landfill has attracted the slaty-backed gull, a Eurasian species that makes its home on the western coast of Alaska.

"For some reason, it was at the dump," Pincelli said. "Gulls are notorious for being far-ranging, but from Alaska ... that's quite a leap."

While the Brownsville Landfill is the Tamaulipas crow's favorite spot in the United States, Pincelli said the bird is very adaptable.

"The birds have nested in the U.S. and produced young at the weather station in Brownsville," he said. "They've also been seen in the Port Isabel area and other cites along the river. When this landfill closes, they'll find the next one."

But as long as the Tamaulipas crow visits Rivera's landfill, he will be forced into double-duty.

"I never imagined it would be my duty to tour people through here for birding purposes," Rivera said. "But we're proud of the fact that we can process 500 tons of waste a day and five bird watchers a day."

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Distributed by The Associated Press