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Whooping Cranes, Mandolins, Gale Warnings, Trivia, and Poker Runs

We had a fun evening last Sunday, when we entertained the crowd at the Casserole Potluck at the community tent. We had sat with some folks at the pancake breakfast on Valentine’s Day that we had previously played cornhole with the day before, and discovered the gentleman, Corky, was a mandolin player. When he found out that I had brought my mandolin and Mike had a guitar, he immediately set up a time to get together and play, with the idea of using that as a rehearsal to play at the potluck. It worked out great, and I think our entertainment was well-received by the potluck crowd, especially our closing number, “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose.” We may do it again! Alas, no photos were taken to memorialize this musical repast.

No, it’s not a Bird of Paradise—that’s a roseate spoonbill,
flying just up the road from our campground

I think Mardi Gras is my new favorite holiday. We went to another parade, this one consisting of about a hundred or so golf carts, with a few floats leading the way. It was through the town of Port Aransas, on our island. Golf carts are very popular here, and when they are decorated for Mardi Gras and full of Winter Texans, they are quite amusing. We rode our bikes up to a viewing spot (didn’t seem like we were going to find parking very easily, as it’s a fairly big island but a small town). Some nice people in the house on the corner where we stopped loaned us a couple of chairs, so we watched the parade in comfort, and the kids around us collected most of the beads and candy that were thrown from the carts and floats. But I did get a few more beads, a plastic doubloon, and my favorite thing, a tiny plastic alligator wearing a joker’s hat and playing a saxophone.

  

  

 The parade was on Tuesday, Mardi Gras itself, and then the next day, we had another adventure, heading along the coast to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on San Antono Bay. We were there last year, but headed back for another chance to see whooping cranes. And this time we were successful! We may have seen one at the Wildlife Refuge, flying along the water and stopping when it found a succulent crab; we also saw deer, javelinas, and herons there, but the man at the information desk told us a sure-fire place to see whooping cranes was in a nearby town, Lamar, on 8th Street. This seemed like an odd but interesting set of directions, and we dutifully turned at Lamar, went to 8th Street, and drove up. There they were!! A whole flock of whooping cranes in a pond near the gulf. Apparently the owner of the land there puts out food for them, and so they stop. They were really something to see.

  
A whole flock of whooping cranes, and two flying low, in search of crabs

We also saw a few of them flying low over the gulf, and then, the next day while on the prosaic chore of taking our sleeping bags to the laundromat, we saw a whole flock of them fly over the area where they were having the Whooping Crane Festival this weekend. I guess they were checking the place out . . . then we stopped at a nearby souvenir/beach wear shop just to look around and maybe get t-shirts, and saw this charming fellow guarding the boogie boards.

On the way back from the laundromat, we stopped at a spot along the main drag on the island where we thought we’d seen some roseate spoonbills. There were TWO flocks of them, and I was particularly pleased to get a photo of one of them flying off to look for some spot that was not so crowded, perhaps. (That’s the photo at the top of this entry.) Though not a super-dedicated birdwatcher, the shore birds are fun to watch, and the whooping cranes were a real treat. I do like the sandhill cranes that fly through southeast Indiana every winter, but the whooping cranes are simply magnificent! The roseate spoonbills are less rare, and much smaller, but they are a delightful shade of pink—and they have those weird long bills, too.


A flock of roseate spoonbills in Port Aransas

The week continued to have lots going on. I have gone on a bit about being bored by Bingo, and that remains true, but this week they had a Trivia session, so I was ready for that. Our mandolin-playing friend Corky had come looking for us to join their team, so I went up and when the team needed a name, I suggested the Wombats, which was our team name with Cyrus and Amanda in Oregon last summer. Well, let me tell you, the Wombats were a force to be reckoned with (also, the trivia questions were pretty simple; sometimes they were actually just riddles). Anyway, we trounced the competition, coming in first with 34 points. Two teams had 27 points and one had 26, so they were all evenly matched—but the Wombats led the way.

Still more fun the next day, when we were kind of nudged into volunteering to set up one of the tables for the semi-monthly Poker Run. At my sister Amy’s suggestion, I made skewers of bite-size food, cheese and sausage, tomatoes and olives, and tiny garlic naan rounds. They were a hit, as were the beads we used to decorate the table and pass out to the Poker Run participants. I enjoyed collecting Mardi Gras beads during the parades, but it was even better getting rid of most of them. We even offered to throw them at people to give them the full parade effect, but no one really took us up on that.


Party food for the On the Beach Poker Run

What a week! Saturday was a little calmer and a lot warmer. I went to the crafts morning at the tent, but other than that we just took it easy. The day ended with a gale warning, and after we learned what we were being warned about (sustained winds of over 30 mph and high seas), our only real concern was that a power line might go down and blow out the electric in the park (that happened last year, and there wasn’t even a gale warning then). The wind blew fiercely all night; the camper shimmied back and forth a bit, but the electric poles all stayed upright, I’m happy to say. Wonder what’s in store next week.



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