It was a pretty good week at the refuge. The weather was just about normal for a change, about 70 degrees. On Tuesday, one of us was needed to help Matt and Sarah with their crane habitat measurements. Steve drew the short straw and Ellen went off with them to get muddy.
Several of the sites were in the tidal flats and a bit of slogging through the mud was in order. The refuge has provided us with hip waders, so at least the legs stay dry and clean. One couldn't say the same for the rest of Ellen. It seems that they also managed to get the UTV stuck in the mud, all the way up to the axles. They had a similar occurrence last week and had to be towed out. Not wanted to face the embarrassment of calling for help again, this time they went looking for sticks and anything else they might be able to wedge under the wheels and then spent quite a while pushing it out of the muck. This undoubtedly contributed to Ellen's muddy state when they returned in the afternoon. Ellen suggested that they might prepare for this eventuality in the future by carrying a few long boards in the bed of the UTV as we have plenty available from the recent boardwalk removal. Sure enough, boards were found there the next day.
Steve, meanwhile, spent the day in the office cataloging papers.
Wednesday, we both went out to the north side of the refuge with Sarah, the intern, to look for Chinese Tallow. It is an exotic ornamental tree (its seed oil is also used for biodiesel production) which has become an invasive tree here in Texas (and elsewhere in the US). It drops lots of seeds and the decaying leaves can be toxic to other plants. The refuge has spent a lot of time and money trying to restore the sandy ridge and swale grasslands by eradicating the running live oak thickets which grew as a result of earlier overgrazing. But, in places, Chinese Tallow has moved in. Some areas are just individual trees, but others are multi-acre thickets of trees.
Last year, a spraying program was attempted using a selective herbicide which targeted the Chinese Tallow. For the thickets, it was done aerially and for the sparse areas, people went out, found as many trees as they could and sprayed them individually. We went out to assess the results. We may have been a bit early, but it was obvious that the aerial spraying was effective at killing the trees, at least by examining along the edges. Finding the individual trees was a bit harder. Sarah had done the original surveying last year to find where trees were, but the sprayers did not mark or record the locations of trees they sprayed. We found some which were obviously dead, some which were actually beginning to bud and some where we couldn't tell. I expect that we may go out again in a couple of weeks when the spring is a bit further along to find surviving trees have begin to grow leaves.
On Thursday, we again went our separate ways. I went out with Sarah and Matt, the crane techs, to measure crane habitat and Ellen went with Sarah, the intern, to the Whitmire unit to check the Foster Lake levels. We visited eight crane sites, only one of which was muddy (and we didn't do measurements there when, as we stood in the middle of the muddy flat, Matt realized that they'd already been there). Except for one, the rest were on dry land with no mud. The exception was completely out in the water and I wasn't needed since they had only to take a subset of the measurements, so I stayed dry and mud-free.
Ellen and Sarah, on the other hand, walked out on the drying area of the lake bed and sunk in. Sarah was wearing boots but Ellen returned with muddy boots and jeans once again. They also did a tour of the unit and found additional areas of Chinese Tallow, where it wasn't known to be (they were actually looking for birds and the tallow was an unexpected and unwelcome find). They did see a covey of Northern Bobwhite though, right next to road.
Yesterday was shopping day. It was a reasonably good day, a bit overcast, so, after Ellen's morning walk and my morning bicycle ride, we took the motorcycles into Rockport. This was only the second time since we've been here that we got to use the bikes for shopping, hardly as we'd planned. It was really the only way as I didn't want to take Speedy on the 70-mile round-trip with a bad shock. We will do it one-way on Monday, when we go to have new shocks put on.
Since we got to Rockport around noon, we started by having lunch at Alby's Seafood. They have supposedly the best Oyster Po-boys around. They were pretty good, but the batter for the fried oysters was, in Ellen's opinion, too spicy, hiding the taste of the oysters. They also seemed a bit shy on the quantity of oysters. Next time we ride into town, we'll try to find the best BBQ place as recommended by one of the refuge's maintenance guys. They didn't know the name, but only the location. Should be enough to find it.
After lunch it was off to H-E-B for the weekly food shopping. We can get a week's worth of food into my panniers and tail box, with an insulated soft cooler in the tail box. We also have Ellen's panniers and box available, but didn't need them this time.
As we were packing the bikes to leave, an old guy came over to talk motorcycles. He was from Bangor, Maine. He had owned BMWs for a long time, had recently restored an R75/5 barn find and currently owned a BMW R1100 RT. He was looking to replace it with something lighter. We extolled that virtue of the F650GS and F800GS and he was very interested. He'd traded the R75 for the 1100 (I couldn't understand why?), but found that it was too heavy (also my opinion of the R1150GS, which I replaced with my F800GS). We suggested that he take a trip to Max in North Hampton, NH, when he gets back to Maine and test drive a few new ones. After that it was time to refuel and head back to the refuge for a chicken fajita dinner.
We realized yesterday that we had not heard the Sandhill Cranes in the last couple of days. They had always flown over the residence area each morning and evening going from roosting area to feeding fields and back. They seem to have departed for areas north. When talking to Sarah, the crane tech, she remembered that they arrived last fall earlier than the Whooping Cranes, so perhaps they also leave earlier.
This morning was pretty foggy, so we slept in a bit. Actually, we slept in and when we awoke, much later that usual, it was foggy. It was a morning for a bird walk. We walked up through the area around the visitor center, seeing both a Carolina Wren and a Carolina Chickadee (the first this year) among others. We were headed for the visitor center to check the recent sightings list. A local birding group comes every Thursday, does a long walk, and generates a list of birds seen and where they were. There is also a white board where visitors can post birds seen. Several new warblers were seen out by the observation tower so we returned to Speedy and got out the bicycles to ride out to the tower. We stopped several times on the way when we heard some unknown calls, without much success and we never found the warblers, aside from a Black and White Warbler, at the tower area. We also saw a Gray Catbird and a White-eyed Vireo as well as the usual collection of herons and shorebirds on the water from the tower. The pair of Whooping Cranes who feed out there were in attendance when we arrived and we saw them flying off to a quieter spot—and one lone Redhead out on the bay.
On the way back, we stopped at the fishing pier so Ellen could call her brother (it's the only place we have cell phone service) while she was on the phone I could see Brown Pelicans, a raft of Ruddy Ducks way out and a single male Bufflehead, as well as Willets, Yellowlegs and a pair of Marbled Godwits along the shore.
Finally, it was time for lunch and time to sit down and update the Speedy Journal.
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