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Trip16

Finally! We agree. We’re moving on tomorrow morning. A private RV park we’ve had our eye on. We found it on the internet and called ahead for a beachfront site. No crested caracaras. No problem. We see a lot of those farther south. They’re only unusual up here. No sparrows. Sparrows suck. Well I did see three today, but they were all Savannah Sparrows. Been there. We saw a bunch yesterday, but they were all Chipping Sparrows. No seaside sparrows. No wrens. Know what my kind of bird is? It’s a Great Kiskadee. There aren’t very many of them, and they don’t go very far north. Not many people ever get to see them. They are bright yellow and black, kind of like Dad’s old Auburn sedan. Their habit is to fly into an area, land on the top of the tallest tree around, and scream as loud as they can. And they are loud. They are big, about the size of a crow, and they are loud. You hear them, then you look around for the bright black and yellow beacon on the top of the tallest tree. That’s my kind of bird. Not some rotten little brown bird that just hides in the bushes and won’t come out. We’re considering getting some press-on labels for the pet dishes. Every morning Judy pours fresh dog food into the dog bowl and fresh cat food into the cat bowl. Every day, each animal goes straight to the other pet’s food to eat. This is not a random thing. It’s not fifty-fifty. Every time. They may sneak some of their own from time to time, but the first meal for each is always the other’s food. Wait! I know! Nevermind the labels. We’ll just switch the bowls. Today’s challenge was to calibrate the compass. Judy gave me a really cool digital compass for Christmas. In 2002. I never installed it in Shamu. Shamu already had a compass, and this one seemed to high tech for Shamu anyway. But now. Now we’re driving the perfect home for this compass. The calibration process follows the installation process. I got through the installation process, no problem. It’s kind of far away, mounted on the windshield, but it is large enough I can see it well from the driver’s chair. The calibration process consists of pushing the correct sequence of buttons, then driving the motorhome completely around in a circle, in no less that 20 seconds, then pushing the right button on the compass to complete the process. This somehow allows the compass to distinguish between the earth’s magnetic field, and the magnetic fields of everything else around it. It is a high tech compass. So today, we took the motorhome out for a final dump before we head out tomorrow morning. On the way back into the campground, we stopped, pushed the sequence of buttons (Notice I didn’t say the correct sequence of buttons). Then drove a loop of the campground, past our campsite, and back to where we started. I pushed the concluding button. Nothing happened. Our compass remains uncalibrated. I already pretty much had the attention of everyone in the campground already with my slow rumbling loop. I decided that was enough for one day and I would try again tomorrow. Somewhere else. Did I mention that we have the best spot in the park? Really, we do. Broadside to the beach, and separated from everyone else. Each time we fire up to move the motorhome to dump it, people in the spots around us run for their ignition keys and watch hopefully to see if we’re really leaving. I’ll save them the serial disappointments. We have located an unused parking lot at the other end of the park. We can drive over there tomorrow morning and drive loops until we get it right. Then we’ll not only have a compass, we’ll have a calibrated compass. The final bird count for this park: 58. Tomorrow, off to Mustang Island two hundred miles south and five degrees warmer. Oh. And just in case you haven’t been able to properly imagine Judy’s new pelican:
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Port Aransas


We watched an osprey hunt. There are four ponds here, and ponds on adjacent properties. Plenty to keep an osprey occupied for half an hour, circling, pausing, holding, circling more. He made a couple false drops, terminated before splashdown, without making any actual strikes. We’ve seen osprey snag trout out of steams in the high country. None from the ponds here so far. We know there are plenty of fish in the ponds. We can see them.

We saw another osprey, this one from the Naval Air Base outside Corpus Christi. It’s a vertical takeoff, tilt rotor, military airplane. It was in horizontal flight mode, big goofy helicopter propellers on the wings, wallowing around in circles over Corpus Christi Bay at about fifty miles an hour. Not an intimidating sight.

Talked to a neighbor, a retired pilot, about it. I commented on how slow it was flying in horizontal flight mode and he said the propellers in front of the wing produce enough movement over the airfoil to generate lift even at slow speeds. You can generate lift by blowing your own air over your wing?

Ooh. If that is true, then who needs all that complicated tilt rotor technology to create a vertical takeoff machine? All you need to do is blow enough air over your wings to create lift. Of course if you do that, you’re going to be pulling yourself forward, but that’s not a problem, blow some air the other way with propellers that don’t blow over the wing to stop the forward motion. How hard could it be? When you’re ready to go forward, just ease off the opposing propellers.

Here is what the real airplane, the Osprey, looks like (I didn’t actually take these pictures myself. I found them on the internet.)

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Trip15

Boring, boring, boring. We didn’t plan to stay here long. Every day we agree we want to move on. Every evening, we agree that moving on the next morning is too soon. Every day we decide to stay another day. I know I talk a lot about birding, but we spend about half of every day birding, so I have a lot of birding on my mind. Today was completely different again. A local publication about birding suggested two roads to drive up and down. These two sections of road probably accounted for four miles, one direction. It was an out and back, so we drove eight miles. It took us four hours. We’re always on the lookout for clapper rails. They are such shy and secretive marsh birds that we’ve only seen them twice before, and only one bird each time. The publication said the marshes along these roads were loaded with rails and seaside sparrows. They were right about the rails! We probably saw fifteen and got to watch each one as long as we wanted. In these marshes, the rails were not secretive at all. We saw so many clapper rails, we’re considering penicillin shots. The sparrows. They’re a different story. Completely. No sparrows. Most herons and egrets fish by standing motionless in the water until an unsuspecting minnow, frog, or crayfish wanders past, then they strike and gulp it down. Reddish egrets don’t follow those rules. They have a dance. They dash about in the shallows stirring everything up, then raise their wings up over their heads forming a cloak which casts a shadow across the water, right under their stiletto beaks. Minnows, distracted by the sudden shelter of the shadow, suddenly become meals. For reluctant prey, the egret will hold the cloaking pose as long as necessary. He will even balance on one leg while he scratches about with the other to dislodge the morsel while maintaining the pose. We got the best look ever at reddish egrets. We got the best look ever at rails. We saw more spoonbills than ever before. One of the nice things about solitary birding is you get to talk to so many nice people. If you’re standing out somewhere looking at grass, trees, or bushes with your binoculars, and someone else with binoculars pulls up, the conversation is automatic. In fact, it is not uncommon, as you’re cruising slowly in the car on back roads, to have someone driving the other direction stop and ask you how you’re doing. They can be other birders exploring the area. It is often a local person stopping to ask: “have you seen anything good?” or “Looking for anything in particular?” Yesterday we were birding from our car in a neighborhood and a lady stopped as she came by the other direction. She ended up recommending a pond that we couldn’t see from the road, but we could get to by parking the car and walking through her yard. Today, we met the guy with the deer. We were creeping along the recommended back road, and he stopped his truck and rolled down the window. “Find anything interesting?” He had his arm around a deer head. He was a nice old guy. Friendly. He wasn’t a birder, but his wife was. The deer beside him had an impressive rack. It was dead. We talked about rails and sandhill cranes. He told us the sparrows were around a few weeks ago but he hadn’t seen any since. He recommended a wildlife refuge we hadn’t been to yet. We were stunned by the deer. It appeared to be a complete deer. We did appreciate all his advice about the birds. Our bird count for this area is up to fifty-six. But it gets better. After we were through birding this afternoon, we were walking on the beach. Even though we name off every bird we see, walking down the beach, it isn’t really birding, because we’re not carrying binoculars. We’re not carrying binoculars, because we recognize every bird we see on the beach now. Except for the one we saw today. It looked like a willet, but it was smaller. It was a Red Knot. That is not a common bird here. It is a very unusual bird for here, so we were not expecting to see it. It is a bird we have never seen before, so add one more to the life-list. Tomorrow, the boardwalk in the nature preserve.
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Trip14

A warm foggy morning. It stayed that way all day. When Judy and I were in the British Virgin Islands, they told us they never had fog there because it didn’t get cold enough. I don’t know how cold it has to be for fog, but apparently 65 degrees is cold enough. Got some new neighbors today. They pulled up with a 40 foot Hitchhiker fifth wheel trailer, with four slides! Four! It is the Champagne Edition. They quit their jobs in Colorado, sold everything, and are headed for Florida. Rags the cat had a bad experience. We moved the motorhome to dump the tanks. Rags had gotten out and we didn’t know it. Judy was outside when I started it up and began to roll. She said Rags came bounding back to the motorhome and was running alongside it, on the wrong side, trying to get back in. She stopped me, picked him up, and put him inside. He didn’t want to get left. Good news for us, but traumatic for him. Jim came back and finished the motorhome fix today. There is a wire that runs all the way from the batteries in back, to the tank indicator switch panel in front. He identified the wire. It had a continuity problem. He hooked up a meter to both ends of the wire to see if they were talking to each other, and they weren’t. Rather than trace every inch of wire, he just ran a new power wire to the panel. Now that the indicator panel in front has power, we have propane as well. We talked with him about motorhomes while he was here. He likes Bounders a lot. He says he hardly ever gets calls to work on them. We like that. We birded the marsh. We saw the seaside sparrow! And we saw the marsh wren too! Maybe. We saw a dark gray little sparrow, but didn’t get a good look at him. We heard the call we had been listening for, but we couldn’t see who was making it. We spotted another little bird in the reeds that looked like a wren, but never got a good look at him. Not good enough. Oh well. Maybe next year. Drove around and stumbled into a great bird wetlands sanctuary in the middle of a bayside residential development. Walked for miles in another marshy preserve. Quiet day. Warm weather. Nighttime walk on the beach. Tonight was an iridescence night. I had forgotten about iridescence. I forget what it’s caused by. Microorganisms in the water, I think. The right disturbance of the water causes it to light up. If you were rowing a boat through calm water, the oars would leave smears of light in the water. A flashing pearly turquoise iridescence. A very eerie light. Tonight, it was best on the waves breaking farthest out. Waves we couldn’t even see in the dark except for the luminescence. It only happens for a few moments, just as the wave breaks. From shore we could see spots and dashes of light. Sometimes just a flash from the middle of wave as it first begins to break. Sometimes, as the wave breaks left or right, the light would shoot across for fifty feet, following the path of the break. Sometimes it would flash in the middle, then run out both directions. It is very good.