At 2:30 every afternoon, she gets a cookie. She remembers, and if we forget, she reminds us. This afternoon at 1:30, she reminded us. We tried to explain the logic of switching time from standard to daylight and back, but she wasn’t buying it. We decided she needed to go cold turkey with the time change like we do and just suck it up.
She didn’t. At 1:40 we gave up and she got her cookie.
They’re not all the same.
Loblolly Pines. They’re all over the Southern U.S. They have medium length needles, maybe 7 inches, in bundles of three. They look like this:
Longleaf Pines, living in roughly the same range as Loblolly, have incredibly long needles. If you haven’t spent time in the south, you may have never seen pine needles like this:
Roughly 15 inches long, also in bundles of three.
Here is a baby longleaf. It looks like a clump of grass.
Big Tree.
A particularly large Live Oak at Goose Island.
There are only estimates of the age. No-one is going to drill a bore hole in it to count the rings. Best guesses range from 1,000 to 2,000 years, so that tree was already ancient when the first Europeans arrived in North America.
It takes a long lens to get a shot of them standing around in a big grassy field.
An adult pair with a youngster. The little ones are hatched in the Northwest Territories in Canada, where the cranes summer, and have to grow up fast to fly with their parents for the migration to their wintering grounds here on the Gulf Coast.
Occasionally the adults get up and swoop around.
Striking birds, about as tall as Judy, but with a much greater wingspan.
Their population reached a low of 15 to 20 birds in the 1940s. This year there are over 500 birds in the wild, with more in captive breeding programs. It has been an intensive conservation effort for 80 years to achieve this success. They are still in real danger, because they only live naturally in two places in the wild. They migrate between Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Canada, their breeding grounds in the summer, and Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas to winter. Their summer grounds are so remote it was many years before anyone could figure out where they went. They would show up here on the coast every winter, then disappear all summer. There are a couple eastern populations that have been established as a buffer in case a natural disaster wipes out the primary migrating flock. Still a tenuous existence.
77.
I didn’t get to take the day off and baby her all day as I’d like. (Well, I did get to make her morning coffee and a breakfast taco, but then I had to go to the computer.) I’m digitally at a conference through Wednesday, finishing off my continuing education for the year. Maybe I can be nice to her all day long on Thursday to make up for it.
Happy Birthday, kid, and thank you for spending your life, and all your birthdays, with me.
