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.
Birds
Got the pink flamingo! Flamingos are not on the Texas bird list, but one got blown off-course from Mexico and landed on an oyster shell island in Aransas Bay. He spends his days standing around with white pelicans and cormorants. The Wharf Cat whooping crane tour boat goes right past him every day. Had our best whooping crane day ever. Saw more than thirty of them. I know how many because I asked the tour narrator how many we saw, since my counting skills don’t go past: one, two, many. Never was any good with numbers. Greater flamingo! We saw ten percent of the world population of whooping cranes. After the boat trip, we drove down the Fulton Beach road to find the flock of redheads that had a female black scoter in it. We found it. That’s another bird that is not on the Texas bird list. Black scoter. We’re racking up the out-of-range birds here. I printed a list of all the birds that are possible here in the winter, marked off the ones we’ve seen already, and have gone on a campaign to find the ones we haven’t seen yet in our fifteen years of visiting here. Tomorrow, the northern gannet. It’s a pelagic bird, but we’re told we can see it from the beach if we know what to look for. Some local birders are helping us by telling us what to look for. Later, to the Corpus Christi dump for the lesser black-backed gull. Still on the lookout for the stilt sandpiper. It is proving to be difficult. We’re told that even though stilt sandpiper is on the list, it’s not really here in the winter. We’ll keep looking. Maybe we’ll find another bird blown off course. Can you find the flamingo in this picture?