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In Search of Whooping Cranes

The cold weather hung around for a few days, high winds, a little ice, a dusting of snow, and we all put away our shorts and bundled up while the temperatures were in the 30s and 40s. But it didn’t last long, and by Saturday shorts were in evidence again. The community tent had been dismantled for its own protection from the high winds, but it was reconstructed with heavier tarps for its side walls on Saturday, and by Sunday everyone on the staff was scurrying around getting the furniture and heaters and lights back in so folks could watch the football games that evening. It was funny to listen from our trailer; down the way from us, someone was watching and would cheer, then about 10 seconds later the folks in the tent would cheer; apparently their feed was on a slight delay.

Icicles and winter coats last week on the Third Coast

But enough about cold weather and football, we also saw a LOT of birds and a couple of alligators as the weather warmed up. We took the ferry to the mainland and then drove about an hour and a half to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge near Austwell, Texas, the home of the only remaining flock of whooping cranes to make their home in the United States. They live up in Canada during the warmer months, but winter on the Texas coast. This was somewhat disappointing to find out, since I didn’t realize the flock of cranes that made their home on a lake in North Dakota in Only Cowgirls Get the Blues was pretty much a figment of Tom Robbins’ imagination, but I still wanted to see these burly birds that stand five feet tall.

Maybe I saw one, maybe I didn’t. I didn’t know it at the time, but I took a lot of photos of birds with my telescopic lens, and when I looked at them on my computer, there were a couple of a big old bird that really does seem to have black legs and black tips on the wings and so I’m going to say I saw a whooping crane. At a distance. See if you agree that the photo below is one of these rare birds.

Is this a whooping crane? Well, maybe . . .

There were a lot of other wading birds, including sandhill cranes (which we see by the hundreds at Whitewater Memorial State Park in Indiana in the winter so they are not rare at all), ibises, egrets, herons, and ducks. All hanging out together.

Herons, ibises, and egrets, oh my!

We also saw more roseate spoonbills, which are pinker in person than in their photographs for some reason. They have funny looking flat spoon-shaped bills, hence their name. I had to refer to Darwin on bird beaks to find out what earthly use a spoon-shaped bill might be for a bird. The answer is that they dip their bills into the shallow, sometimes murky water in marshes and move them through the mud to feel for fish and invertebrates to eat. The wide bill helps them more easily feel for prey without needing to see it.

Roseate spoonbills hanging out in the marsh,
scooping up some lunch

Besides birds, the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge is also home to javelinas, which just walk down the dang road like they own it, and that kind of surprised me. We also encountered a couple of alligators, one of whom makes his home under a bridge on one of the trails. This may be where the troll story originated.
Keeping an eye on the alligator under the bridge

It was a nice sunny day and fairly warm, so we also had a picnic lunch while we were at the refuge, and enjoyed a view of the turquoise waters of San Antonio Bay (which is not actually very near the city of San Antonio). On the way home we stopped at a Wal-Mart which said online that it had the kind of muesli cereal Mike likes, but once again we learned not to trust the Internet—no Bob’s Red Mill Muesli to be found.

We decided to stop for a seafood dinner at Grumbles after we took the ferry back to the island, and another disappointment, the restaurant had a sign on the door that said “Closed for Repairs.” So we went down the street to Tortugas and still managed to have a seafood dinner; Mike had flounder and I had fried oysters and shrimp. My dinner also had fried fish, but Mike ate that along with his flounder because there were enough oysters and shrimp that I wasn’t going to bother with plain old fish.

This morning we moved from our E1 campsite to the one at F1—probably a good 25 feet away—because someone else already had a reservation for this coming week at E1, and we had added these days on to our original reservation here. It was not a difficult move, and Mike got to try out the new higher hitch he had gotten to keep the front end of the trailer up a bit higher (for road clearance, I believe). It worked fine. However, we found out from a few of our fellow campers that this move might cause problems for some of them. Our little Scamp had become a landmark in the campground, people knew to look for it and then turn down the row to their campsite. But now we are at the top of another row, so they may all lose their way until they find something else to use as a landmark.

Finally, I went up to Wacky Willy's Laundromat today to put our sleeping bags and quilts through a wash and dry cycle, and in a copy of the local paper I found there was a great photograph of three guys who went fishing down the coast a ways and didn't even know a SpaceX rocket was launching right behind them. I thought it was a funny photo, so—not my photo, but thanks to the Port Aransas South Jetty newspaper for this amusing shot. (The photo was taken at the Brownsville Ship Channel, a good 200 miles south of Port Aransas.)


Some good-looking speckled trout, and an exploding rocket



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