The Rio Grande Valley was once covered in forest. One man is trying to bring it back.

A ‘thorn forest’ once covered 1 million acres in the Rio Grande Valley. This man is trying to bring it back

Jon Dale’s love affair with birds began when he was about 10 and traded his BB gun for a pair of binoculars. Within a year, he’d counted 150 species flitting through the trees that circled his family’s home in Harlingen, Texas. The town sits in the Rio Grande Valley, at the convergence of the Central and Mississippi flyways, and also hosts many native fliers, making it a birder’s paradise. Dale delighted in spotting green jays, merlins, and alta…

The Rio Grande Valley was once covered in forest. One man is trying to bring it back.

By Laura Mallonee | Grist This story was produced by Grist and co-published with the Texas Tribune. Jon Dale was 15 and an avid birder when he began planting native seedlings beside his house in Harlingen to attract more birds. He hoped to restore a bit of the Tamaulipan thornforest, a dense mosaic of at least 1,200 plants where ocelots, jaguars, and jaguarundis once prowled among hundreds of varieties of birds and butterflies. Developers began …

The Rio Grande Valley was once covered in forest. One man is trying t…

The Tamaulipan thornforest once covered 1 million acres on both sides of the border with Mexico. Restoring even a fraction of it could help the region cope with the ravages of a warming world.