It was a dark and stormy night ……. It was an awesome storm. It has been warm, foggy, overcast, and rainy off and on for the last couple days. Last night it all broke loose. Midnight thunderstorms, frightening the dog and pounding the motorhome. Judy got up to look, and said it was like someone making a movie in the rain under pouring fire hoses. It rained in waves. The ocean was wild. The ocean got closer to us while we slept. Our 100 yards of beach shrank to twenty yards. I snoozed warm and dry in bed until it was over. We’re happy to report that the Bounder, slides and all, weathered the storm flawlessly. It was a noisy night. It was great! This morning dawned flooded. Our site was fine, but the one directly across from us was completely under water. We had our oatmeal and coffee: a leisurely morning in the fog and drizzle, then headed out for Mustang Island 200 miles to the south. We left 65 degrees and foggy and arrived at 80 degrees and blue skies. It was good. We drove loops in the parking lot to calibrate the compass. It worked. You know how you can check the accuracy of you speedometer, by watching the highway markers? You find a watch with a second hand, hold sixty miles per hour exactly for one mile and time yourself. If it takes exactly 60 seconds, you’re lucky, and your speedometer is accurate. If it takes something more or less, not only is your speedometer off, but you have to be able to do arithmetic to figure out how much it is off. There is another way. You ask Judy how fast you are going, she pushes a button on the computer, and the GPS Navigator announces “current speed, sixty-one point seven miles per hour”. Instant. Agrees with our speedometer. We’re lucky. This measurement is not tied to the vehicle at all. The speedometer is driven by the wheels and road. The computer is corresponding with satellites overhead that all agree our speed is sixty-one point seven miles per hour. Last time I asked the computer which satellite it was using to track us, it listed the eight satellites that were currently engaged. Big Brother? We are currently being monitored by eight big brothers. We’ll be careful not to do anything nefarious while the GPS is online. Just when I thought there would be no more clues forthcoming in the great cream cheese incident, a resolution presents itself! But I have to start somewhere else. I have to start with diet. I have discovered recently that the afternoon food fades I’ve experienced all my life are due to carbohydrate poisoning. Nature’s most perfect food: complex carbohydrates? Starchy foods like potatoes, pasta, rice, and bread. They’re poison to me. I eat them. My liver panics and floods me with insulin. The insulin sucks all the sugar out of my blood. My forehead hits the table, or whatever else is in front of it. It leaves a mark. Every person needs carbohydrates to function. Now what do I do? The solution is elegantly simple. All vegetables are made up of carbohydrates, but they don’t deliver as heavy a load as the starches do. I don’t have to abandon carbohydrates altogether and try to figure out some other way to survive. All I have to do is abandon potatoes, pasta, rice, and bread altogether, and eat as much of every other kind of fruit and vegetable I can, and I get all the carbohydrates I need, and I feel awake and great. How cool is that? And what could possibly go wrong? Cream cheese. It’s all about the cream cheese. I had discovered a new favorite snack. Celery and cream cheese. It gives me some fat in the cream cheese, balanced by the carbohydrates of the celery. Nothing complex there. I’ve been eating it every day. Now I have to digress one more time. When my blood sugar gets low, I get to feeling generally lethargic. One of the symptoms of being lethargic is that I don’t think things through well, often failing to recognize that I’m feeling lethargic, and not considering that I might have a blood sugar issue. I had been feeling lethargic for several days. The only little change in my diet lately, has been the addition of the perfect snack. Celery and cream cheese. That was it! The cream cheese! I read the labels. Cream cheese is about 50% carbohydrates. Hard cheese is about none. I don’t know what it is about the carbohydrates in the cream cheese, but that was the problem. I substituted hard cheese for the cream cheese the next day, and the energy was perfect. Which brings me to the great cream cheese incident. Here, all this time I was wondering if a pet could possibly be involved in appropriating my cream cheese for their own benefit, but without any clues, who’s to say? Now I realize I was completely wrong in my suspicions. It was not a matter of pets putting their interests ahead of mine. It was our animals, who are much more in touch with inner processes than I am, protecting me from myself! They knew, days before I figured it out, what I was doing to myself, and at the first opportunity leaped to my defense. They fell on the grenade. They sacrificed their own energy levels to protect mine. What noble creatures.
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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:
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.)
Houses05
And our house and yard on the beach.
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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.