Birds, Birds, Everywhere

Southeast Texas is one of those places where you can't help but notice birds. This morning a Fish Crow was croaking incessantly while I pumped gas in Port Arthur (price was $1.73 per gallon, for those of you in California who might be curious). In recent days I've seen Swainson's Hawk and White-winged Dove on the drive home from work, and Great-tailed Grackles are conspicuous and ubiquitous in urban areas. As I write this there is a Blue Jay at my birdbath and a Brown Thrasher running on my front lawn.

Defective Tree

Yesterday I looked out my bedroom window, and was surprised to find that a large branch of the pecan tree behind the house had fallen. It was still tenuously attached to the trunk, but there was a whole lot of tree resting on the lawn. Bought a serious saw and went to work on it this morning. Of course the summer heat has finally arrived, so it was a miserable sweaty job. Most of the main branch is still dangling from the tree - I figured it was too dangerous to try and saw it off while overextending my reach from atop a ladder, and it'll probably come down on its own anyway, and it was too hot to keep hacking away at it...so I quit. 

Troy recently helped me dispose of most of the rubbish I'd collected over the past 18 months. We rented a U-haul truck and filled it with wood scraps and old appliances and carpet remnants and unwanted doors and cabinets and rain gutters and window blinds and other leftover trash, and hauled it all to the dump. The backyard looks much nicer without all that junk piled there.

Recently I spent part of an evening down by the pond. At dusk I watched the first bats appear...we got lots of bats in my neighborhood. Some were flying low, chasing insects to within a few yards of where I was standing (considering how many mosquitoes I was attracting this was not a bad thing). Don't know which bat species we have here, but saw one or two that looked impressively large...

Fireworks

What a day and what a night! Just got back from a spontaneous trip to Louisiana. Sometimes you roll out of bed not knowing where the day is gonna take you...

I was lazy and slept in until about 3pm on Sunday. When I finally got out of bed I decided to go on a little road trip, visit the Walgreens in Orange where I used to work, and maybe see some of Louisiana while I was at it. Hillary and I broke up recently, so I planned on going it alone, but before leaving I received an IM from Lisa, who I last saw back in January. She lives in Orange, and since I was already going that way...

There were a couple of mockingbirds attacking a snake (a Blotched Watersnake, I think) in front of her parent's house. We didn't really have a plan - just got in the car and started driving. Crossed the Sabine River, and stopped at a rest area on the Louisiana side. There's a swamp boardwalk there...didn't see much there aside from dragonflies and cypress knees. No gators, no turtles. But there were magnificent curtains of spanish moss hanging from the cypresses, and a Northern Parula was singing from somewhere in the canopy. It really looked like Louisiana is supposed to look, that postcard image of the blue bayou...

We didn't have any luck finding a good place to eat in Sulphur, so we kept driving and finally stopped at a seafood place off the highway in Lake Charles... mood lighting, unwanted shell fragments in my crawfish etouffée, and $$...We've both had better, but then it didn't suck either.

Next stop was the Isle of Capri Casino. It was already dark when we arrived, and we joined the crowd atop the parking garage to watch the fireworks display across the water - nice show, and there was a cool breeze, so it felt good to be outside. Birds were swarming around a high rooftop nearby, and I was curious but didn't make any effort to identify them...all I know is they definitely weren't nighthawks (might have been swallows). Played the cash eating machines (or did they play us?), and as soon as Lisa and I had thrown all our money away we hit the road again. My pockets were about $30 lighter after that little adventure. Then it was back to Orange, where a big yellow moon was rising above the trees, and the stars were out.

...and now I'm back home, and it's the middle of the night. It was good seeing Lisa again. A couple of random observations from recent days come to mind...a Green Treefrog, its body inflated like a little balloon, calling to others of its kind from atop the drive-thru sign at the Jack-in-the-Box...a Summer Tanager fluttering down from a tree in my yard with a huge cicada buzzing loudly in its beak...