Wild animals pay no attention to human borders, unless a fence hinders them. But fences are generally ignored by animals that fly, so what’s the difference between New Mexico and Texas? Western Texas in particular should not seem much different from New Mexico, to flying animals. I find reports of “pterodactyls” in these areas interesting.
From the book Live Pterosaurs in America:
“I live in central N.M.. Fourteen years ago, in [Socorro], N.M., me and a close friend, who now has a masters in biology, were hiking during the midday sun at [a] box canyon and something blocked the sun for a moment. We both looked up to see what did that and saw a large flying animal.
“It had a 20-30 foot wingspan and was about the same length long. It had a long tail with [a] seeming spike at the end. Its head was very pterodactyl shape with a fluted back pointy head. It glided at about 700 feet in a westward direction. . . . we watched it glide . . . and land somewhere on the southern expanse of Magdalena Mountains.”
The fact that the two eyewitnesses saw this creature in the middle of the day does not necessarily mean that it was not nocturnal. When an animal that is normally active at night is disturbed during the day, it can well become temporarily active.
Although most sightings of reported pterosaurs in Texas are not with estimated wingspans as large as this one in New Mexico, size does come into play, sometimes, in attracting the attention of eyewitnesses.
A lady and her brother, in San Antonia one evening in 1986, saw something flying around across the road, a little above the phone lines. “It would go one direction, turn, and swoop back. The shape was wrong for any large bird of the area, and the size was much too large to be any bat . . .”
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