Author: Steve

I learned years ago not to play Sudoku right before bed.  It’s a repetitive thing, and if I get that machine in my head going, and there is nothing else to distract it, the machine just keeps going and going and going; making up imaginary Sudoku patterns and solving them.

Last night’s mistake was to do a round of Spanish on Duolingo right before bed.  Got the machine going again, lying there making up imaginary situations that would accommodate my limited knowledge of Spanish, then coming up with words and phrases that would address them.

Sleep would have been more appropriate.

We find javelina in all sorts of habitats.  I came up on this one in a wide-open grassy field.

He waited until I got pretty close before he decided to create some space between us.

Cool birds.  Big.  Like chickens.  And loud.  I’ve sent out pictures of them before.

They’re also interesting because they don’t always look exactly the same.  More character.  Here is one fluffing up to lie down in the dirt.

Looks so comfy.

Vultures are built for efficient soaring, so they don’t have enough muscle power to fly very far by flapping.  They get exhausted quickly.  They’re migratory birds so they have to circle up on wind currents or thermals to get the altitude they need to migrate long distances.  When they have to cross a body of water, it’s touchy.  There are no thermals over large bodies of water, so no lift.  They had better be high enough to make it all the way across before they start.  That’s not a problem for vultures here in the Americas because they can just stay over land.  It is a problem for the vultures migrating between Southern Europe and Africa though.  If they try to cross directly over the Mediterranean, drowning is the most likely result.  A safer route is an extra thousand miles to go around to the east, or go west to the narrowest point, the Strait of Gibraltar, for about an eight-mile crossing.  But I digress…

We have two species of vultures that we see here, the black vulture and the turkey vulture.  They look different.  Here is a comparison of their silhouettes from below.

Turkey Vulture.

Black Vulture.

Different wing shape.  Different coloring.  Different tail shape.  The turkey vulture has that red face, but you can’t always see that.  The black vulture isn’t really that much smaller, the bird was higher.

That’s a gray hawk.

It’s not a migratory bird.  It picks out where it wants to be and stays put year-round.  It wants to be at the southern tip of Texas and along the Southern Arizona border.  From there down through Mexico and Central America, to South America.

From way over there, this guy took off.

And flew right over my head.