TIRES! TIRES! Everywhere!

Before

Patrolling for illegal use of refuge land, including dumping, is one of our duties at Lower Rio Grande Valley NWR.



After

  Last week we had an opportunity to clean out on old tire dump found on one of our western tracts, San Francisco Banco. We spent a couple of days transporting the 375 tires to a suitable road for pickup on the northern boundary.

We were very thankful that the weather was cool since we blundered into Africanized Bees nesting in a tire. The bees were very slow moving because of the cool temperature. Kurt was the only casualty with only one sting. The next day we worked on another project while the NWR Fire Crew exterminated the nest. Finally we met the tire recycler who loaded the tires onto his semi trailer to be fed to their huge grinding machine.

The many lizards we met living around the tires were much friendlier than the bees. Virginia couldn't resist picking up this large collared lizard.