2025 Comes to an End

I sit here alone at the Intrigued HQ. The staff is home enjoying the holidays with their families, there is a warm glow from the single light above my desk, a completed stack of performance reviews sit in the outbox, a nice cup of peppermint white hot chocolate steams by my open laptop and the pad of paper with the end of year to-do list only has one item left unchecked – a final post for the year. Looking back, this has been quite a year. So many bright spots along with some struggles I would just soon forget. On the positive side, I am once again very proud of our posting efforts this year. A quick count shows 77 total posts for 2025 (including this one) with Brad bringing you 23 of those from his (and Jan’s) work in the field. Each of those take a significant amount of time from the captures in the field, image processing, storyline, editor review, legal review and the general administration to get them out to you – a heartfelt thank you to everyone that gets this Intrigued gear to rotate.

Then there are the tougher aspects of this year. Although the ankle break technically happened in 2024, the surgery and recovery (ongoing) took up a bulk of this year. Duration wise, this is the worst injury I’ve had to deal with in my lifetime – which is saying a lot as I have had my share of mishaps. As an update to this saga, my surgeon gave me the green light to start running on flat surfaces. He tapped the brakes on the trail running and wants me to hold off 6 weeks before that level of stress. Bittersweet on that as I already had my trail shoes sitting by the door for when I came home. Swapped those out for the pavement shoes and now have a few sloooow runs under my belt. Pain..some…endurance base..atrophied…a huge smile on my face – DEFINITELY. Still a long way to go, but it is a hard to put into words the feeling of freedom that was felt.

And that feeling of freedom is exactly what led me to pick this particular series for the last post of the year.

Hit the jump to learn more about these tropical sounding residents of south Texas.

To set the stage, Linda and I were visiting my absolute favorite Rio Grande Valley birding hotspot back in March of 2024 – Estero Llano Grande State Park in Weslaco. Note, this used to be at the top of my hotspots for ALL of birding, but this year’s trip to Southeast Arizona may significantly impact that ranked list – reassessment in progress. You will definitely learn more about that amazing Arizona trip in the coming year.

We had just surveyed the waters straight out from the deck of the visitor center and were headed out to explore the rest of the ponds when an odd sound caught my attention. The best way to explain it is someone trying to run a piece of rubber down a glass window (link here). This was a exercise in subtraction from my internal database cultivated over the years in the field. An audio quicksort was executed (that should bring back fond memories for you software professionals out there ha) trying to match the sound coming from above with anything in the reference synapses. That resulted in an empty set.

Now incredibly curious, I turned around and spotted two emerald green shapes rising up from the nearby trees. “Hey, Linda, look at those interesting birds up there“. Linda still mocks me repeatedly on this as she claims it came out as “Eh da oohkose trin gurds upyer” which explains the monkey themed response “Me birder, you Jane“. In my defense, I can get a little excited in the field when spotting a potential new bird. Brought The Beast on point and initiated the epic battle to get settings dialed in before they passed out of sight 30 seconds later. Nothing like trying to compensate for back lighting with a relatively dark bird.

Curious, I admit to “chimping” at the back of the camera trying to figure out what had just flown past – this just reinforced the mocking that was still in progress from my better half…if she wasn’t such a good bird spotter I would have said something hehehehe. To my surprise, the LCD screen revealed a Red-Crowned Parrot or to be more accurate with recent name changes, the Red-Crowned Amazon.

I was definitely not expecting this discovery being the first time in all our visits seeing this exotic looking bird. Red-Crowneds are established breeding birds in south Texas. According to Cornell, back in 2019 there was an estimate of over 700 of them in south Texas that was initiated as far back as 1885 when a severe drought hit Mexico.

You might be wondering about that comment earlier regarding the “freedom” theme. If you didn’t notice already, take a closer look at the left leg of the lowest Parrot. This was a surprise reveal in the digital darkroom as it went completely unnoticed during the brief encounter…and obviously missed during the chimping. My best guess is this was an escapee as it doesn’t really look like fishing tackle – unfortunately, an all too often “adornment” seen on shorebirds along the Gulf coast.

Glad to see it was able to engage with the local flock(s), already had a mate and seemed to be doing just fine with the leftover hardware. I can only imagine that this Parrot was experiencing a similar feeling of freedom.

Time to close up the laptop, down the last of the hot chocolate and turn off the light. There is a lot of packing still to do at home. Take care everyone and once again, thank you for giving us that most precious of all life’s commodities, your time. Cannot wait to see what 2026 has in store and looking forward to bringing you our encounters from the field – some of them from far away lands.

From the entire Intrigued family, best wishes for a happy and injury free New Year to all!