The Nature of Things

On our recent trip to West Texas, I was able to get in a little birding, which is always one of my chief pleasures on any trip that we take. I also tried to take pictures of the birds that I saw, but I was generally disappointed with my efforts. I had all kinds of excuses.  There were too many people; it was spring break week and at times it seemed the whole world had descended on West Texas, normally a sparsely populated place. At Big Bend National Park, for example, usually a place of splendid isolation with its 1,252 square miles of desert and rugged mountains, we had to wait in a mile-long queue of automobiles for forty-five minutes just to get into the place. The ranger who checked us in remarked that spring-break is a four-letter word for the staff who work there. Americans of all colors, races, and creeds seemed intent on loving the great park to death. But though I saw people of many kinds, I didn't see so many birds. One covey of Scaled Quail , some Greater Roadrunners do...

I guess I've complained enough about my rain-spoiled birding vacation in the Rio Grande Valley. It was a week I had long looked forward to, since it is one of the birdiest places on the planet. I was hoping to see lots of new birds. That didn't quite work out, thanks to the weather, but, in fact, I did see quite a few birds. I even managed to get pictures of some of them. This group of Roseate Spoonbills was resting at mid-day in the wetlands of the World Birding Center on South Padre Island.  Also at South Padre was this Long-billed Curlew . A pair of Mottled Ducks napping in the sun - the first sun we had seen in several days. This was one of the two Red-breasted Mergansers I saw and was able to photograph at South Padre. Green-winged Teal were quite common in the ponds at Estero Llano Grande State Park. Lovely ducks! As were the very distinctive Northern Shovelers . I wasn't able to photograph very many songbirds that I saw, but this little Savannah Sparrow was coo...

I am a devoted birder so I am always up for a good book about birding. Here's one about an Australian "big year."  ~~~~~ Big Twitch: One Man, One Continent, a Race Against Time: A True Story about Birdwatching by Sean Dooley My rating: 3 of 5 stars The record for a "Big Year" in Australia was 633 birds.  That was before Sean Dooley decided to spend his year breaking it.  Not only did he want to break it, he wanted to annihilate it.  He set himself the goal of seeing and identifying 700 birds from January 1 to December 31, 2002. It helped that he didn't have much of a personal life at the time - no family, no significant other, no one to slow him down.  No 9:00 to 5:00 job either.  He was a comedy writer in real life, but that wasn't requiring much of his time and effort just then.  He was able to single-mindedly devote himself to his obsession. This book tells how he did it, with all the ups and downs along the way.  He had a lot of help from fri...

The Gulf Coast of Texas is among the birdiest places one can find on this continent. On any given day, there are around 200 different species there. At times during spring migration, the number is closer to 300. During our trip along that coast last week, I didn't get anywhere near the 200 figure. The weather was rather miserable, gray and drizzly every day, and the conditions for birding were not optimal. Still, I did manage to see a goodly number of the feathered residents. I've already shown you the most spectacular feathered creatures we saw - the Whooping Cranes of Aransas . Here are a few others that we encountered along the way. The Whooping Cranes were not even the only cranes that we saw on the trip. In a meadow near the entrance to Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, a small group of Sandhill Cranes were making a rest stop on their way north.  A total of six of the birds were looking for snacks in the marshy field.  And cranes weren't the only big birds around. We a...