The Rio Grande Valley of south Texas has been getting quite a bit of rain lately but it's been spotty. I have noticed on weather radar that quite a bit has been hitting the brush country of Willacy and northern Hidalgo Counties so I made a run up to the Teniente Tract of the Lower Rio Grande Valley NWR in western Willacy county to check things out. Turns out it is more lush up there than I have seen in recent years with lots of stuff blooming. But the butterflies are still low in numbers. That's not a big surprise as it takes a some time for numbers to recover after the extreme drought. I saw only twenty species with none of the two big specialty butterflies, Red-crescent Scrub-Hairstreak and Erichson's White-Skipper, though their bladder mallow host plant was thriving.
Butterfly of the day was this Giant White. These big tropical pierids can travel a long way on the southerly breezes.
The only Desert Checkered-Skippers I saw were several attracted to the minerals in the damp sand. Here is one looking small next to a Laviana White-Skipper.
This is the first iNat record for Soldier for Willacy County.
The blooming Climbing Milkweed also attracted Queens.
But the major find of the day was a half dozen or so Mesoxaea texana feeding on the milkweeds. There are only a few records on iNaturalist of the bumble bee sized member of the family Andrenidae. I saw one last year a few miles to the west and did not know what it was. But this time I recognized these cousins of the Glorious Protoxaea immediately. What a cool bee!
