Lots of birds in the Zooming slide show this month – from the Whooping Crane Festival in south Texas as well as Josey Ranch (Carrollton TX), the Springfield Botanical Gardens (Springfield MO) and Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge (near Sherman TX). I find myself picking images that show bird behavior rather than portraits.
There are spring flowers in this collection as well…more of those coming in April!
Enjoy the March 2024 slide show!
Our second day of the Whooping Crane Festival continued with another boat tour after returning from the King Ranch and a quick lunch. The afternoon emphasis was on bird photography. The difference was subtle. The guide did suggest some settings to accommodate photographing in the very bright environment of a sunny day. I opted to take the normal opportunities to photograph birds as usual…but then took some photographic challenges too.
I started before we even boarded the boat. Grackles were taking snack packaging out of a trash can. The female seemed to be unimpressed with her partner’s antics.
I attempted to get a double-crested cormorant taking off from the water…managed to capture the form and splashes of water but the eye doesn’t show….plenty of room for improvement.
There were terns (probably common terns) diving toward the water for fish. I tried pointing my camera in that direction and pressing the button to take multiple pictures in fast succession. It was hard to hold the camera still as the boat moved! The shape of the bird as it nears the surface of the water was something I couldn’t study until I looked at my pictures on a bigger screen. This was my first attempt at photographing feeding terns!
The back of a white-tailed hawk – the only sighting of this species of the trip. It isn’t a great picture in the traditional sense….but it does tell a story. The bird was sitting in dead mangroves; the mangroves died during very cold weather a few years ago and recovery is slow; hurricane damage to the Aransas area would be even worse than before if one comes through before the mangroves can become established again.
The birds always seemed to be a little further away than optimal…and the boat was rocking. But I took pictures anyway: white ibis, little blue heron, osprey, great egret, and great blue heron. I tend to take photographs rather than make notes about what I am seeing…it’s easier with the camera already in hand!
And then there were the reddish egrets… with their pink and black bill.
And finally one started foraging…moving rapidly in the shallows. It seemed to veer off suddenly…something there that the bird didn’t expect?
I took group pictures of birds on small islands in the water…always interesting to see how many I can identify on my big screen later. In the one below, I see brown pelicans (adult and juvenile), American white pelicans, cormorants (double crested probably)…all in the foreground.
As I zoomed in on birds that were not in a group I noticed a black skimmer and some Caspian terns.
It’s always a thrill to see a bird I would not have seen without being on a birding field trip like this red-breast merganser. It was a single bird…swimming rapidly away from the boat…and I probably would not have noticed it without someone pointing it out. I’m not sure it was the guide or another participant that noticed it.
The same was true for another black-crowned night heron. I photographed one on the King Ranch in the morning! I was pleased that I was able to find and focus on the bird more easily than many of the others on the boat.
The light began to change as we neared the end of the day. There were enough clouds to try a non-bird landscape shot of the water the sky…a bit of land at the horizon.
I changed a setting on my camera to try an artsy image of a cormorant and the shore as we came back toward the dock.
And then the boat stopped just before we got to the dock….for dolphins. I couldn’t top my husband’s dolphin picture in the bow wave of the big ship, but it was fun trying to anticipate when they would surface!
And then one last picture before we got off the boat! It was a great second day at the Whooping Crane Festival. The next morning was an early one….getting on a boat at 6 AM to see Whooping Cranes in the Aransas National Wild Life Refuge. We headed to the hotel for an early evening to be ready for it.
So much happened in April that was unique – or at least something we had not done in over 25 years! More that half the ‘days’ featured this month’s post are related to our move. I’ve listed then in the order they occurred and am surprised at the move milestones that occurred in April:
1st virtual house tour. This was not an option 25 years ago and both my husband and I were skeptical that such a tour would be ‘good enough’ to enable us to be comfortable bidding on a house. The first one convinced us that such tours were adequate to eliminate houses from consideration! Our realtor was very patient and good about highlighting aspects of houses as she walked through…and later in the month – after several experiences with virtual tours – we did indeed bid on a house before we saw in in-person.
Finding no houses available in Springfield that we liked. What a depressing day. Both my husband and I were primed to buy a house but there was a day that we had eliminated all the houses on the market.
Bid on house. And then a house came on the market. It wasn’t perfect but we had honed our idea of what we wanted enough to know that it was as close as we were going to get, and we could live with its imperfections. We scheduled a virtual tour and bid on the house the same day.
Contract signed. After one round of negotiations the contract was signed….and we were on the path to buying a house!
Seeing our house. Within 4 days we were in Springfield and walking through our house for the first time. It had a surreal quality after seeing it so thoroughly in the virtual tour.
Accepting a mover’s bid. Long distance moves are expensive and the last one we had done was paid for by our employers. The process has changed somewhat…the biggest one being the virtual way of creating the inventory of what is being moved!
There were some other unique experiences/sights in April:
1st long road trip with my husband post-pandemic.
74 black crowned night herons roosting.
A policeman – lights flashing - removing a deer carcass from a narrow roadway. I was thankful that he was taking care of it before the morning rush hour.
Several bald eagle and great blue heron nests…close together.
Our main activity for the last day of the Rio Grande Valley Birding festival was breakfast (sumptuous) as the The Inn at Chachalaca Bend followed my a walk around the grounds looking at birds. We started near the Inn’s deck on the bank of La Resaca de las Antonias. We saw a Belted Kingfisher on the electrical wires crossing the Resaca almost immediately!
A Great Blue Heron and Great Egret had a little conference in the distance.
There was a broken tree trunk (or old telephone pole) near the water….a perch for an Altamira Oriole.
Directly across from the Inn an Anhinga dropped down into the water to capture a fish then walked back up a palm that was slanting over the water.
Nearby on a snag, a Golden Fronted Woodpecker searched for breakfast.
There was a ruckus and then a larger bird flew toward us over the water and sat on the electrical wire nearest us: a Ringed Kingfisher.
There was Great Kiskadee on the wire further away
And a Black-crowned Night-Heron in the vegetation across from where were standing.
The kiskadee flew away and we notice a kite (probably white tailed…but hard to tell for sure).
We left the Resaca to hike around some open field areas. We saw an American Kestrel looking at the meadow.
As we headed back almost to the edge of the path through a forested area, we looked up and saw masses of migrating American White Pelicans! There were several groups…maybe as many as 1,000 birds.
The path branched off to the edge of the Resaca again and we saw a Snowy Egret (note the yellow feet which is a distinctive feature for this bird even if the focus is not very good for the picture).
As we got ready to leave, we gathered back at the Inn and saw a hummingbird at the feeder (probably Ruby-throated).
There were a few plants I took pictures of…but they were secondary to the birds!
Copyright © 2024, Gwen Morrison. All rights reserved.
Celebrating the whole of life....
Thanks for visiting my blog! Enjoy the photo picks from last month:
Copyright © 2024, Gwen Morrison. All rights reserved.
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