March 12, 2024

Whooping Crane Boat Tour

March 12, 2024/ Gwen Morrison

We were at the dock for the 7 AM departure of our boat on the third day of the Whooping Crane Festival.

I took a few pictures before we boarded – the moon over the harbor area.

Our destination was the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge where Whooping Cranes feed in the marshy/shallow areas…only visible via boat and it took over an hour to get there from Port Aransas. We passed familiar areas early on and saw a group of American white pelicans, morning light with moon setting over the shore, roseate spoonbills and white ibis in the distance, and the Aransas Pass Lydia Ann Lighthouse.

Then we entered an area that was different than our previous tours and more open water…with occasional platforms with cormorants and great blue herons hunkered in the chilly morning wind. There was a tall bridge as well.

Then there started to be a lot of small islands full of birds: Cormorants, great blue herons and brown pelicans. One area seemed to have a lot of great blue herons and I wondered if the island was their roost. There were also groups of laughing gulls. (Click on the small images to see a larger version.)

And then we started seeing Whooping Cranes. Even at a distance – they are easy to identify because they are so large…and so white. The young are rusty looking – particularly their heads. Many sightings were of 3 birds: 2 adult birds and a colt; it must have been a good year for increasing the whooping crane population!

There were other birds to see too between whooping crane sightings – roseate spoonbills, green-winged teals, willets, American avocets, more great blue herons, buffleheads, cormorants, an osprey, and reddish egret (that took off as a wave covered the spit of shells the bird was standing on).

I took some closeups of some shells…out of the water at low tide.

I also realized how wakes of boats impact the shoreline…why there are often blocks on the shore to reduce the erosion wakes can cause. It doesn’t take a big or fast-moving boat to cause damaging wakes in smaller channels.

And then we took a break as we headed back to Port Aransas – no more photos until the jetty with the usual brown pelicans.

We got back to the dock with plenty of time before our afternoon field trip for lunch; we then headed back to the Leonabelle Turnbull Birding Center.

August 24, 2023

Dickerson Park Zoo

August 24, 2023/ Gwen Morrison

We made our first visit to Dickerson Park Zoo last week. It’s on the north side of Springfield MO – the closest zoo to where we live. We got there about an hour after their opening; the close parking lot was almost full…others taking the advantage of the cooler than usual August morning.

Colorful birds seem to dominate my pictures. Many times, I was photographing through fencing; sometimes you can see the blur/shadow of that barrier.

The preening Scarlet Ibis was one of my favorites. The surprise was seeing the nictitating membrane (an eyelid that is hinged on the inner side of the eye and closes horizontally across the cornea).

Flamingos were in the same enclosure as the ibis – feeding and preening. They feed with their bill toward their bodies. One of the birds had a range of colored feathers.

In the trees above the flamingoes, there were several roseate spoonbills. Their bodies are colorful…their heads and large bills are bare – at odds with the body.

Peacocks (and pea hens) roam the zoo; they are relatively acclimated to people. There were no males with full tails. All the birds I saw appeared to be juvenile birds (younger than 3 years).

There were two Gray Crowned Cranes. I had seen similar birds at the St. Louis Zoo too. The birds at Dickerson Park Zoo were better positioned for a photograph!

The turkey enclosure had one male and a lot of hens…some immatures as well. I heard a mother telling her child that it was a mom and babies; I guess she thought the male was the ‘mom’!

Black swans are dramatic. The pair seems to have more ruffled feathers than I expected.

There were several parrots; we heard them before we saw them! The one I photographed was using its beak like an appendage for balance as it moved around its enclosure.

There were two types of tortoises in different parts of the zoo with signage that they bite! The first one was large but not giant…and I was intrigued by the pattern of the shell…plates like flatted pyramids.

The second was a giant tortoise --- looking well fed!

There were monkeys – somehow they tend to look sad to me. The one I photographed had companions that were moving about, but he was sitting still.

The zoo was working on the giraffe exhibit (they usually have giraffe feedings) so we did not see them like they would normally have been out and about in the morning.

The zoo has a rescued bald eagle – large but one of its wings was not right. It didn’t move from its perch but kept a watchful eye on movements outside its enclosure.

There were metal statues for climbing on (with signs warning that the statues might get hot in the summer) and backdrops for photographs.

There was one elephant with the explanation that when the matriarch died, the two remaining females did not get along…so they each are outside on their own. They get socialization time off exhibit with a male elephant.

There were other animals to see but not easily photographed. The big cats and bears were either in their dens or sleeping.

We didn’t ride the train (I photographed it with a giraffe sculpture in the foreground) – but I like that it is available – another dimension to a visit to the zoo that we might try on a future visit.

The Dickerson Park Zoo might be my favorite. It is not overwhelmingly big or crowned…and its design provides plenty of shade along the paths.

August 08, 2020

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 8, 2020

August 08, 2020/ Gwen Morrison

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Performance of the Year | The Prairie Ecologist – Video of an Eastern Hognose Snake pretending to be dangerous.

Millennia-Old Rock Art in Israel Offers Window into Lost Culture | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine – Monuments 4,000 years old…dolmens. There are more than 400 in the same area. A survey of them started 2012 after the first rock art engravings were discovered (14 trident-like shapes on the ceiling of a large dolmen).

Backyard Birding in Central India to Beat Lockdown – Backyard birding - something that is happening around the world during the pandemic!

Granite tors evidence of ice-free Alaska - The Field - AGU Blogosphere – Tors mark the Pleistocene pathway that was free of glaciers for plants and animals during the ice age.

Great, Warm Lakes – This is an article from a month ago…I’m just getting around to reading it. The surface temperatures were warmer than usual as of July…in some of the lakes there are areas warmer by more than 4 degrees C (including most of Lake Michigan)!

Restoration of Sicily’s Temple of Zeus Continues - Archaeology Magazine - A 26-foot-tall sculpture of Atlas dated to the 5th century BC…and there might have been as many as 40 such statues.

Winners of International Photo Contest Celebrate the Art of Movement – Capturing a moment…freezing motion.

Blood-thinner with no bleeding side-effects is here – Still work to be done….the current formulation is filtered out by the kidneys very quickly. It has applicability in artificial lungs (used to bridge the time between lung failure and lung transplantation) currently.

Poor Everglades Nesting Season A Result of Climate Change and Untimely Storms – It appears that 2020 isn’t a good year for roseate spoonbills and wood storks in Florida.

This Medieval Potion Kills Stubborn Bacteria – “Bald’s eyesalve” – garlic, onion, wine, cow bile. It appears to be effective at combating antibiotic resistant bacterial strains…biofilms that are particularly challenging to kill…including diabetic foot infections.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

3 racoons. Our birdfeeder camera made a video of some visitors to our deck just before 2 AM on Wednesday, 8/5: three racoons! They looked smaller than the female that came several times earlier in the summer. Perhaps they were her young….out foraging on their own (maybe she was nearby). They were no more successful than she was getting seed from our squirrel proof birdfeeder! The action started with one up on the deck railing under the feeder and another 2 directly below on the deck floor. The one on the railing comes down almost on top of one that was on the deck floor. The one that was on the deck railing stayed in the video the longest…thoroughly searching under the feeder after going down to the deck floor.

2020 08 IMG_1223 (2).jpg — **Sycamore branch**. Back on August 2nd I posted about a dead branch in our Sycamore tree (picture on the left). My husband discovered the branch on the ground near the base of the tree when he went out to use the weed eater and it took both of us to pulled it to our brush pile at the edge of the forest. It came down without bringing a lot of other branches with it….a little sooner than I expected but probably brought on by the thunderstorms that have been sweeping through the past few days.

Yellow wooly bear. My sister sent me a picture of a caterpillar from her garden in Carrollton, Texas. It appears to be a yellow wooly bear that becomes a Virginian Tiger Moth. Evidently, they are common but neither one of us had seen one before.

February 14, 2019

Rainy Morning at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge

February 14, 2019/ Gwen Morrison

The last morning of the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival was rainy. We’d signed up for a field trip about birding by ear and habitat at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. It was one of the few field trips that was not cancelled entirely but it was changed considerably by the weather. We talked through the topic of using other than markings for bird identification – songs, habitat, silhouettes, behavior…and then did the best we could to observe some birds. We didn’t do any hiking…just observed what we could from the visitor center and from within the car along the wildlife loop. Still – it wasn’t a bad morning for seeing birds. The visitor center has feeders that attract Painted Buntings this time of year. What a treat to see these brightly colored small birds!

Then it was out to the wildlife loop to look at water birds. The first one we saw was a smallish white bird at the edge of the water. In was in the right habitat for a heron or egret…about the size of a cattle egret but in the wrong habitat since they are usually in fields. It was a juvenile Little Blue Heron with green legs and a washed out looking face….definitely not a Snowy Egret.

There was a group of Northern Shovelers feeding – living up to the ‘shoveler’ name.

Glossy Ibis were feeding in the shallows and mud.

There were some Roseate Spoonbills feeding almost out of range of my camera. Watch the one in the center in this sequence.

There were was a mixed group of birds: Roseate SpoonBills, American Avocets, and a Great Egret. That area near that shore must have been rich pickings.

A little further along the shower there was a group of American White Pelicans in the water. The group might have been working together to herd fish into the shallows – easy feeding.

Last but not least - a Tricolored Heron made an appearance. It too was looking for breakfast in the shallows.

Overall – it was not a bad ending for the festival. It would have been better had it not be raining…and even better if the sun had come out. We picked up some snacks intended for some trips that were cancelled and headed back to the hotel to pack for the trek home the next day. Both my husband and I enjoyed the festival and I’m sure we’ll do it again – leaving more time between field trips (and before/after the festival) to do some photography at our own pace. It’s a rich area for birding and more comfortable in the winter than it is in the summer.

January 04, 2018

National Aviary (Pittsburgh)

January 04, 2018/ Gwen Morrison

Last Friday afternoon was very cold in Pittsburgh – and a lot of people decided it was a good day for the National Aviary. Our first clue that it was going to be crowded was the full parking lot. We pulled into a parallel space across the park from the aviary and walked across the frozen, snow dusted paths to the gate in the fence around the Aviary. The priority was food instead of seeing birds since we hadn’t had time earlier for lunch. The café area was crowded but we managed to satisfy ourselves enough to last until dinner…and then headed to the Wetlands area. We walked in a few minutes before feeding time. The schedule feeding times are great for picture taking. They have several spoonbills and I got a picture of the underside of bill like I did for the white ibis on South Padre Island; the spoonbill underside is the same concave shape. I also realized that spoonbills are don not have totally bald heads like vultures, but they certainly have a receding feather-line.

The flamingos seemed to be doing their preening while standing on one leg.

As the staff (and volunteers) started feeding the birds, the birds moved about more, and I was able to get different angles of the same bird. Some of the colors change dramatically.

There are sometimes surprising patches of color that become visible only from the side or back.

The hadada ibis has wings with a sheen.

Some birds are small and fast…hard to photograph except when worms are offered on the railing and they fly down to gobble them up.

Some appear drab but have ‘personality’ when viewed via the camera’s zoom.

One of the pelicans flew up to the top of a tree in the enclosure….closer to the glass roof….alas no sun while we were there.

Of course, there was water below the bridge walkway we were standing on…if there were fewer people around I would taken more time to photograph the variety of ducks present in the exhibit.

As I turned to leave - I noted the brilliant yellow tail feathers of a bird on one of the pipes high overhead, near the ceiling…a last hurrah for the wetlands exhibit.

November 29, 2017

South Padre Island and Bay Cruise – Part 3

November 29, 2017/ Gwen Morrison

The last part of the field trip was a cruise on the bay. The first ‘sight’ was a lighthouse with scaffolding around it as we neared the dock on our bus.

Then we were off and looking for Peregrine Falcons under the bridge. We spotted several but there was only one that was positioned for pictures.

There were mud flats with Laughing Gulls,

An Osprey surveying the scene, and

A Great Blue Heron walking awkwardly in the mud.

There was an island that provide roosting sites for Great Blue Herons (7 of them in the foreground) and Roseate Spoonbills (8-10 of them in the background).

This is the best picture I got of the Roseate Spoonbills as we cam around their side of the island.

Brown Pelicans, Double-crested Cormorants, and laughing gulls were groups on the sandy beach.

What birds to you see in these two pictures? So you see the Green-winged teals (2 males and a female), Black-Necked Stilt (2), Great Egret, Laughing gulls.