Big Bird of the Rio Grande Valley: the Lawson and Davies sighting and the Grimaldo attack

Late 1975. Rumours of a giant bird started on a Robstown playground. The stories spread south, into the Rio Grande Valley. Around the turn of the year, San Benito police officers Arturo Padilla and Homero Galvan watched from separate patrol cars as a huge bird glided over Valley City without flapping. "The wingspan I guess was about like a pretty good-sized car, about 15 feet or so," Padilla said.

New Year's Day, 1976. Tracey Lawson, 11, and her cousin Jackie Davies, 14, were playing behind her parents' home near Harlingen. About 300 feet away, a large bird stood in an irrigation canal. Tracey went indoors for binoculars, and when she looked through them, the creature was staring back at her. It was about 5 feet tall, with a gorilla-like face, a bald head and a short beak.

Their parents did not believe them. The next day, Tom Waldon found three-toed tracks beside his home in Harlingen, 8 inches across and pressed about 1.5 inches into soft dirt. A Harlingen TV station later showed prints from a freshly ploughed field near the sightings. Each measured 9 inches wide and 12 inches long.

About 10:30 p.m. Armando Grimaldo, 26, was having a cigarette outside his mother-in-law's house on the north side of Raymondville. "I heard a sound like the flapping of bat like wings and a funny kind of whistling," he said. Dogs began barking. He looked around, but not up.

As he turned to check the other side of the house, it came. "I felt something grab me, something with big claws." The claws tore his jacket and shirt and knocked him down, and he ran, dove to the ground and crawled on his belly under a bushy tree. He heard heavy panting, then it flew off. He described a creature about 6 feet tall, with dark, leathery, featherless skin, bat-like wings spanning 10 to 12 feet, a monkey-like face and large red eyes.

Neighbours found him shaking, his clothes torn "to shreds." He kept repeating one word, "pájaro." He was taken to Willacy County Hospital in shock. "I've never been so scared in my whole life," he said. Some sources date the attack to January 15.

Radio station KRIO of McAllen offered a $1,000 reward for the bird delivered alive. Texas Parks and Wildlife officer Ed Dutch warned that many large Valley birds were protected. "The punishment for catching a protected bird could cost a hunter $5,000." New reports came from Brownsville, Eagle Pass and Del Rio.

On February 1, Texas A&M ornithologist Keith Arnold proposed a jabiru, a Central American stork with a featherless head and a wingspan of roughly 10 feet. Later that month, Don Farst of the Gladys Porter Zoo identified a bird filmed near Alamo as a great blue heron. On February 13 the Valley Morning Star declared: "Legend of [Big] Bird is Dead."

No hoax finding against Lawson, Davies or Grimaldo appears in the record. Ken Gerhard argues that the closest witnesses described a primate-like face, not a beak, and suggests an unknown giant bat or a surviving pterosaur. Matt Bille called the Grimaldo case "either a seemingly impossible survivor or a hoax."

Gerhard tells the story in Big Bird! Modern Sightings of Flying Monsters, published by the Centre for Fortean Zoology. A 45 rpm single about the Big Bird of the Rio Grande Valley pressed 20,000 copies. No photograph of the creature from either encounter is known.