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Category: Nature

Great Blue Heron

November 14, 2007 • • Leave a comment

Another great bird. Over the past few months I’ve developed a thing for egrets and herons. The great blue heron being one of my favorites. When I see one fly overhead, I tend to stop and stare.

I especially love watching them take flight, their slow but sturdy wingbeats pushing them up several feet at a stroke. Unlike the ubiquitous turkey vultures riding lazy on the thermals, the great blue herons seem to have a sense of where they’re going.

This one was settling in to roost for the night atop a tree overlooking the golf course. I wish I’d been clever enough to climb down from the trail where I was riding my bike to get onto the other side of him so the sun would be at my back, but I would have lost the light by the time I got down there.

I took a few pictures and rode on.

Great Egret

November 14, 2007 • • Leave a comment

This fellow has been hanging around our local pond lately. I know nothing of his personality, but around here being a great egret is simply a matter of not being a snowy egret or a cattle egret.

If only it was so easy to be a great person.

Walkin’

November 13, 2007 • • 2 Comments

Saturday morning was perfect for walking the trails around the neighborhood. I started at the pond, enjoying the way the early light struck the trees from low in the east.

The ducks had come back to the pond after summering in northern climes. A great egret and a great blue heron also came by to catch the scene and probably a few fish as well. A turkey vulture and a low-flying helicopter also made appearances.

After the pond, I walked up to the little nature preserve I discovered back in August. Even though Texas isn’t known for its autumn show, it still felt that way with leaves falling like golden snow while the cobalt sky blazed in that special autumn way beyond the branches, growing more naked with each gust of wind.

I watched the path more than anything, though, listening to the sound of my feet crunching the leaves into next summer’s mulch.

Ladder-backed Woodpecker

October 30, 2007 • • 1 Comment
Ladder-backed Woodpecker

Until Saturday, I had never seen a woodpecker. Heard ’em, but never seen one. Then, last Saturday morning while sitting out back with the pups, I heard a faint rustling high in a tree in the backyard. I looked up and saw an unfamiliar bird with a striped back climbing along the upper branches of the tree.

This isn’t a great picture, but he was moving quite a bit, and I was trying to get something (anything!) so I could ID him before he took off. Fortunately, I got this and by zooming in with Photoshop, I could figure out his species. (I’m pretty sure I’m right).

Later, I put a woodpecker block in one of the hanging feeders. Hopefully he’ll come back so I can get a better look at him (and hopefully a better picture of him, too).

Still, adding a new bird to my list made for a great start to a really nice weekend.

Discoveries Close to Home

August 7, 2007 • • 2 Comments

On the tail end of a bike ride yesterday, I wanted to make it an even 23 miles so I turned on a street near our house and found a trail leading to another neighborhood. I took the trail, which led to a cul-de-sac with a small nature preserve only .25 miles from home.

The preserve is mainly a small karst formation with a cave underneath. The sign said that the cave is 85 feet by 45 feet, but only 2 feet high at its highest. The cave entrances have been gated off in such a way that bats and other wildlife can get in and out, but snooping kids are prevented from entering.

Later in the evening I walked back up with my camera to see if I could get a few pictures.

This is one of the caves that had naturally collapsed so there was no need to block it off. It’s now just a two foot deep hole.

In addition to this dragonfly, I saw mockingbirds, white-winged doves and a number of deer that seemed to be running all around me, allowing only glimpses as they raced through the cedar. One of these days, I’m going to bring the long lens and some patience and try to shoot a deer.

I liked the look of this fallen tree, rotted and teeming with life.

These flowers ignited if only for a brief moment in the sun’s fading light.

Yellow-crowned Night Heron

July 6, 2007 • • 2 Comments

While we were in Orange, I kept seeing this fellow standing in a ditch by the road hunting crawfish. Finally, I stopped to take a picture so I could ID him. He’s a yellow-crowned night heron.

I love the name night heron. It’s such an evocative name, one that fires the imagination. Not quite as good as the Latin version of the black-crowned night heron (nycticorax nycticorax), which translates to night raven, though.

The picture here doesn’t really do him justice as his crown appears more white than the pale yellow it should be. Blame the photographer. The bird himself was living up to his name, which he claimed was actually Moe.

I also added another bird to my life list: the fish crow. I heard what sounded like a nasal quawking, but the birds flying over looked like crows, but the sound was definitely not the hard caw-caw. I listened to some recordings online and consulted many a tome to learn that I had seen fish crows, a fairly common coastal bird.

The Accidental Hiatus-ist

July 6, 2007 • • 4 Comments

We did not wash away in the floods, though I’m still trying to collect two of every greyhound for the ark I’ve been building. Unfortunately, they are each individuals, so I’m only able to find one of each.

Mainly, I hadn’t blogged because I wanted to finish my book. I didn’t want to sit at the computer writing and not be writing that, so blog went by the wayside to meet my self-imposed end of June deadline. I made it with a few days to spare.

The manuscript came in at 249 pages or 66,ooo words. A short novel, called A Short Time to Be There, at least for now. When I went back and looked at the early pages written before I really knew the characters or the pace of the story, I found a few chapters and some scenes that I didn’t really need, so I found myself going with Stephen King’s dictum: 2nd draft = 1st draft – 10%. When that 10% comes from the front end, things start to move better. Redundancies disappear.

I finished the book last week. The next day R’s grandmother died so we had to go to Orange to help with arrangements before the funeral. She died in her sleep at her home without any illness or hospitalization a few weeks shy of her 87th birthday. It was a tough surprise, but then it’s hard to imagine a better way to go.

On the long drive east to Orange, we saw a coyote standing on the side of the road outside Elgin. He ran when he saw us. We spotted a red-tailed hawk perched on a power line near Houston. A bobcat ran across the road in front of us in Orange. I never see that much wildlife from my car. I had never seen a bobcat before. The weather was weird too. Powerful storms kicking up while we were in church, where she was honored, and also right before the funeral.

My mind kept going back to Caesar: “When beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

Of course she wasn’t royalty or even a prince, but she was noble. She would help anyone who needed it. She took in the lost. She never gave up on anybody.

The Birds: Twenty Mile High

June 22, 2007 • • 3 Comments

I took a twenty mile bike ride along the trails and roads around our neighborhood. I found myself keeping track of all the birds I saw along the way and saw 21 different species. Better than a bird a mile.

Great Blue Heron… flying over the creek, slow and beautiful

Snowy Egret… trailing the heron by a few minutes

Great Egret… swooping over the lake and landing

Green Heron… hunting along the edges of the lake. I wasn’t sure what he was. I had to call and leave a description on the answering machine so I could ID him when I got home

Common Grackle, Great-tailed Grackle, European Starling… foraging in a field near a basketball court

Northern Mockingbird… everywhere; it is the state bird after all

Northern Cardinal… until today I had only seen these guys at feeders, but today they were everywhere along one trail

Inca Dove, Mourning Dove, White-winged Dove… they have a trail where they’re the only birds I see

Purple Martin, Barn Swallow… martins in the sky, swallows along the ground, all patrolling the same trail

Blue Jay, House Sparrow… everywhere

American Crow… small flock congregating in the middle of a country road, flew off when I approached… kaw-kaw

Scissor-tailed Flycatcher…. watching from the power lines

Mallard, Muscovy Duck, Swans… feral domestic breeds hanging around the local duck ponds

And that’s just what I could ID as I blazed by on my bike. I know I saw a few that I couldn’t place, particularly sparrows.