Tuesday we were back to work. We were off to Port Aransas to help out at city's Nature Preserve with a Brazilian Peppertree removal project. The pepper trees are a serious invasive plant in this area. The city was having a volunteer event which brought in people from all the various environmental agencies and a good contingent of local volunteers. We, along with Sarah, went to spend the morning helping out tear out trees.
They are really large overgrown bushes with lots of limbs and intertwined trunks and are quite messy to remove. The city provided sawyers to do the cutting and we helped haul the limbs away...lots and lots of limbs. In some places, they carted off the brush in trailers, but on the trees we worked on, we were able to stack the brush in abandoned road depressions to decompose on site. The trees fortunately do not root from branches. Ellen and I spent most of the morning working with two other volunteers and a sawyer on a single tree.
Before we headed back to the refuge after lunch, we stopped at one of Port Aransas birding spots, the Leonabelle Turnbull Birding Center. There were lots of ducks, mostly sleeping, just hanging out next to the boardwalk. In just a few minutes we saw Blue-winged and Green-winged Teal, Norther Shovelers, Ruddy Ducks, Widgeons, Pied-billed Grebes, American Coots, Common Gallinules, Black-necked Stilts, Blue Herons, Great Egrets, Snowy Egrets, Black-crowned Night Herons, Snowy Egrets, Green Herons, White-faced and White Ibis, Brown and White Pelicans, Laughing and Ring-billed Gulls, Long-billed Dowitchers, Roseate Spoonbills, Common Yellowthroats, Marsh Wrens, Northern Harriers and a Cooper's Hawk.
It was time to go back to the refuge. We were tired!
Some photos
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