Author: Steve

Practicing patience.

These South Texas guys crack me up.

When we were kids in Southern California, we knew about the desert.  We learned to be wary of flash floods.  Dry arroyos.  They’re dangerous, even if it not raining.  The rain can be miles away in the mountains.  The water builds up in the mountains and consolidates down to the dry arroyos, rising quickly, flooding within minutes.  That’s a flash flood.

When we get rain here, and there is a danger of flooding, the weatherman refers to the situation as “flash flooding”.  There isn’t a hill within a hundred miles, and we’re going to get a surprise flash flood?  The ground is flat.  It rains.  The rain has nowhere to go, so the water slowly rises.  I think that’s actually just called flooding.

Males and females.

A Northeastern bird.  Judy and I are Westerners.  We never heard of these birds before we came to Texas.  They pass through here on their way from wintering grounds in South and Central America.

A strangely behaving curve-billed thrasher alerted me to an issue.  Seeing him jumping around squawking and flapping, I went back inside and grabbed the camera.  Once I walked back out, the thrasher perched on the blue heron statue to watch the conclusion of the drama unfold from there.

The bird had already harassed the 5-foot-long indigo snake enough that he had begun leaving by the time I got there.  Here is a shot of his front end, but the head was obscured.  You can see the rest of the snake still curled up in the garden.

And here is the back half disappearing into a hole underneath the side of our shed.

Indigo snakes are beautiful and they’re beneficial too, eating rats and mice.  We’re very glad to have an indigo snake at our house, looking glorious and reducing the rat and mouse population (as well as having the neighborhood roadrunner bird who helps keep down the population of house sparrows).

We get to see birds we don’t normally see the rest of the year.

Like hooded warblers.

In the bushes.

In the grass.

Sometimes almost underfoot.

Or right out next to a sidewalk.

And sometimes female.

From: Steve Taylor
Sent: Saturday, April 25, 2026 3:16 PM
To: Judy Taylor <judy@taylorroth.com>
Subject: It’s migration

We get to see birds we don’t normally see the rest of the year.

Like hooded warblers.

Sometimes almost underfoot.

Or right out next to a sidewalk.