Another Wild Kingdom moment on th weekend. Watching a pack of twenty-five great blue herons scattered about the wandering water in a tall grass wetland, we spotted a red-shouldered hawk standing on a little blue heron carcass. The herons spotted him too. Twenty-five long necks with little heads popped up out of the grass to watch. A ferruginous hawk joined him. The hawks were okay with each other, both standing at the same carcass, but not with the dive-bombing peregrine falcons. A pair of peregrines hassled the ferruginous into leaving. The red-shouldered finally flew away out of sight, lugging the treasure in his talons. The peregrine pair flew back to stand on the sandbar on the salt flats watching the gulls and shorebirds.
Port a
Friends leave. We’ve been here long enough to make friends; other people who stay here long enough too. Charles and Jackie, who had been next to us for a month, left to return to Alabama. Ron and Linda on the other side of Charles and Jackie for a month left to return to Dallas. Jim and Elle, our friends from Colorado, left too. Again. We met Jim and Elle briefly at Dakota Ridge in Golden last fall. About the end of December, they showed up next to us here at Gulf Waters to check it out. Didn’t take long for them to decide they liked it and buy a lot over on the other pond. Then they left on their prearranged trip south of the border. They had signed up for a two-month RV tour to Belize. After a few weeks here, they drove to Pharr, in South Texas, to meet up with the rest of the group. Meeting the group, they decided they disliked the caravan idea as much as they liked it here. They still wanted the experience, though, so they crossed the border and headed south. They just did it by themselves. After a few days they hooked up with some traveling Canadians. They were having a good time, but their rig was a little too big for those tight Mexican roads. Several road related adventures later, they decided to come back here and regroup: leave the big rig here and go back down in a smaller motorhome to meet up with their Canadian friends and continue the tour. So they were here again, but now they’re gone too. Again.
Birds
Standing at the edge of the pond, picking out birds for each other and locating them by how far they were from the log one way or another, one of us finally took a closer look at the log……
Beach
We didn’t get what we expected. We expected a beautiful, seventy-five degree, blue-sky day on the beach. What we got was a beautiful, seventy-five degree, totally foggy day on the beach. We packed up for a picnic, and spent the day driving down the island. We thought we would be looking out over the ocean for sea birds. Instead, we were watching for shapes looming in the fog to make sure we didn’t drive into a fisherman parked on the beach. It was a great, unexpected, day.
Texas
Barges on the intracoastal waterway. They just push them around like boxcars that don’t have to be on rails.