South Llano River State Park - Texas

One of the fun things about volunteering is looking for new places to volunteer.  We had started thinking about possible winter 2019 opportunities.  We want to stay in Texas but were looking for a new site.  Mark sent inquiries to a couple of state parks that we have enjoyed visiting in the hill country area and got a response back from S. Llano River State Park in Junction.  We have stayed in this park many times but never volunteered there.  We got a response that they had an opening in January of 2021!.  We told them to go ahead an put us down for it.

In the mean time we had a day with nothing planned and decided to visit the park.  Mark called the volunteer coordinator, who is also the Superintendent, Scott, to see if we could meet with him.

We visited with Scott for a couple of hours.  Turns out he has worked at three other state parks we have volunteered at.  He showed us the volunteer sites and the maintenance buildings and then informed us that the volunteers for this coming winter (November-January) were not going to come back and that time slot was open, if we wanted it.

We told him we would let him know and thanked him for taking the time to talk with us.

There are 4 bird blinds in the park so we decided to do a little birding while we were here. 

They are very well maintained and most have beautiful water features.  One of our jobs as volunteers would be to fill bird feeders every morning. Scott was also intrigued that we were birders and mentioned that they would like for us to lead bird walks as well. 

This is a great area to see birds. Some of them are large and colorful.

Woodhouse's Scrub Jay

Spotted Towhee

While others are LBJ's (Little Brown Jobs).

Lincoln's Sparrow

Fox Sparrow

This water feature was popular with a group of Cedar Waxwings and a Robin.

We also saw the strangest looking Gray Catbird we'd ever seen. This poor bird had no tail. Absolutely none!  This wasn't a normal feather replacement, so we guessed that some predator had gotten a hold of it by the tail and had yanked the entire thing off.  The bird was flying awkwardly but seemed to be getting by.

Gray Catbird - No Tail!

Gray Catbird

After seeing some great birds we stopped by the visitor center once again and told Scott, We’ll take it!.  So, we know where we’ll be this coming November!