Binoculars are a must and a scope will be very helpful.

There are two different areas to bird. The wooded area is good for warblers including the Orange Crowned, Yellow, Yellow-throated, Black-throated Green, Yellow Rumped and Wilson's. There are also Sparrows including Chipping, Song and Lincoln's. 

Look for Rails and Soras as you walk down the boardwalk. There is a gazebo at the end where you can see an amazing variety if birds. In the winter you will see lots of ducks including Redheads, Pintails, Shovelers, Green and Blue Winged Teals, Mottled, Pigeon and others. Year-round can see lots of Sandpipers, Herons and Egrets. There will be Pied-billed Grebes, Avocets, Black-necked Stilts and Brown Pelicans. 

Hans & Pat Suter Wildlife Refuge, located on Ennis Joslin and Nile, offers nature lovers an ideal spot to observe birds and wildlife along Oso Bay. Take a walk on the 1-mile nature trail and an 800-foot boardwalk for good views of Oso Bay, grassy marshes, woodlands and mudflats. Picnic tables and viewing platforms are spread throughout the refuge for visitors to enjoy.

Along the Cayo del Oso, a Corpus Christi city park created in the 1950s has grown to become an important protected habitat for area wildlife. But it also has ties to the Native Americans who inhabited the area going back thousands of years.

The park, known these days as Hans and Pat Suter Wildlife Refuge, began as South Guth Park in the early 1950s. The park's roundabout creation began in 1931 when snowbird Henry Guth died. He willed the land to the city, stipulating it be turned into a public park. The city debuted Guth Park in 1939 with trees and flower beds tended by the Business and Professional Women's Club. 

But Guth Park fell into disrepair, and in 1950 the city sold the land to Joske's department store for $151,000, using the money to purchase two tracts in other parts of the city for parkland. An 80-acre site off Up River Road became West Guth Park, and 71 acres on Cayo del Oso became South Guth Park. 

Ennis Joslin Road was built in 1954 to help alleviate some of the traffic to the naval air station along Ocean Drive and Lexington Boulevard, and ran through a portion of South Guth. 

With its prime spot along the Cayo del Oso, it's no surprise that portions of the park were well known by birders. The city then commissioned a study for best use of bayfront land covering North Beach all the way to the naval air station, and the recommendation for the area known as the blind Oso was, surprise, to leave it as it was — an environmentally important estuarine nursery for marine life and feeding area for shore birds.

Local environmentalists Dr. Hans Suter and Patricia Suter also fought extensively to keep this park and the surrounding area free of development. Hans, a Swiss native, worked for Celanese Research Center as a chemist before becoming a consultant in environmental protection and wrote a guest column for the Caller-Times for nearly 20 years. Patricia was a chemistry professor at Del Mar College and head of the Audubon Outdoor Club.

In 1986, the 22 acres along the Oso got some improvements, including an 800-foot boardwalk over the marshlands and 3,500-foot-long hike and bike trail connecting the birding area of the park with a recreational area featuring picnic tables and a playground. The spot was also renamed the Hans A. Suter Wildlife Area in honor of the conservationist, who died in 1984.

The remainder of South Guth Park on the other side of Ennis Joslin Road got a few improvements over the years, but as Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi expanded, it was in need of more housing. The sports leagues built new homes, and in 2008, the city gifted about 137 acres of land to the university that included South Guth. The wildlife area and park along Cayo del Oso remained, and after further improvements in 2011, the wildlife area was rededicated as the Hans and Pat Suter Wildlife Refuge.

But like all land in this area, it originally was the home of the Native Americans in the region. In the mid-1990s, the Texas Department of Transportation began work on upgrading Ennis Joslin Road. In the course of widening the road, workers found evidence of Native American use. Excavations conducted near the Cayo del Oso in the 1930s by University of Texas archeologists had uncovered confirmed burials in the area, unearthing the remains of 60 people.

In 1996, an archeologist was hired to conduct test excavations in this new section, and eventually TxDOT and the Texas Historical Commission determined portions of the area had been used as burial grounds sometime between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D.

Researchers determined the people were likely ancestors of the Karankawa tribes that lived in the area up through the 1850s. The Karankawas were systematically killed by settlers, and the remaining tribe members fled to northern Mexico in 1858. The tribe was thought extinct for many years, but surviving tribe members managed to intermarry and pass down portions of their tribal culture and language for several generations. The Karankawa Kadla have now banded together to preserve their heritage.

Local Native American activists, led by Larry Running Turtle Salazar of the South Texas Alliance of Indigenous People, were angered by the continual disturbance of the burial grounds, especially because they did not receive notice of the remains until 2005. State officials said they didn't notify tribes sooner because they wanted to avoid looting of the dig sites. 

Requests to stop the disturbance and to rename the road in honor of the Native Americans were refused. Instead, the park now houses a medicine wheel where Salazar hosts an annual blessing of sacred grounds, with hopes to eventually construct a monument commemorating the burial site.

Hans and Pat Suter Wildlife Refuge Trail on AllTrails
https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/texas/hans-and-pat-suter-wildlife-refuge-trail?sh=uwkyb3