On Thursday Ellen and I returned to the Whitmire Unit of the refuge to cut more saltcedar. After reading about the plant online, it became obvious that we were fighting a holding action. The plants bloom continuously from March to October. Our original plan was to just cut off the flowering parts and leave the rest for the scheduled summer crew to cut down and spray.
We decided to take a much more aggressive approach. We would cut the bushes down to chest to waist height removing most of the the greenery and all of the flowers. Hopefully, this will leave the plant alive when they come to finish the job in the summer and we will have forestalled any seed production for this year. It would have been much easier if we could have cut them to the stumps and sprayed them ourselves.
We cut down an entire grove of about 25 bushes in the morning and headed back to the truck for lunch. As we were walking along the shoreline we saw two large long-legged birds out on the lake, one very orange. The first thought was flamingoes, however they aren't supposed to be here. But they were two big for Roseate Spoonbills, which we have seen on the lake. I had my small binoculars in my Camelbak. Out it came.
Sure enough, they were two flamingoes, one bright orange, the other very pale. Ellen tried to take a picture, but her pocket camera zoom decided to pack up at just that instant. We hurried back to the truck to get my camera with the long zoom. I rushed back out onto the flat just in time to see them take off and head east over the lake around a point. I walked down to the lake and about 200 yards out onto it (It's only about four inches deep that far out) until I could look all the way down the lake. I searched all along the far shore, but there was no sign of them. I did see three Whooping Cranes and six more stands of saltcedar, however.
When we got back to Speedy I looked back through the eBird database and found that this pair had been sighted last in January and had been around the coast for years, but rarely seen. They are both banded birds. The orange one is an American Flamingo, who was part of a large colony off the Yucatan in Mexico, but migrated to the Gulf Coast and paired up with the pale flamingo who is a Greater Flamingo from Tanzania that escaped from a Kansas zoo in 2005. They somehow paired up together and have evidently thrived along the Texas coast.
Ellen came down to the lake and we looked over the rest of the birds along the shore which included Black Skimmers and Royal Terns and another life bird for Ellen, the Gull-billed Tern (the American Flamingo was also a life bird). There were also a selection of shorebirds.
After lunch we went back to the saltcedar, focusing on a group of bushes near our entrance to the lake. We trimmed three more large bushes and I pulled out the last 20 or so saplings from a muddy area that we had started on our first day. That was enough and we decided it was time to head back to the refuge and some needed showers.
Friday was shopping day with a bonus trip trip to Port Aransas. We had planned to ride the motorcycles, but it was very windy in the morning. We actually started out on the bikes and it wasn't too bad going through the wooded area just outside the refuge, but as soon as we reached the open fields we ran into a 25 mph crosswind. Ellen was healed over about 15 degrees just trying to go in a straight line. We went about five miles before we admitted this was going to be no fun and turned back to the refuge to exchange the bikes for Speedy. It was a bit steadier in the crosswinds.
Our first stop was Port Aransas, beyond Rockport. Two of our friends, Kate and Garry were to arrive on Sunday from California for a couple of days visiting on their way to a visit with Garry's nonagenarian aunts in Waco, Texas. Kate has started to collect lighthouse passport stamps. One of the stamps could only be gotten at the Port Aransas Museum where they have the lens from the old Port Aransas light. Since the museum was only open Thursday-Saturday and she was arriving on Sunday, we offered to get her lighthouse passport stamped. So she sent it ahead to us and we went off to Port Aransas. We got it stamped.
This also gave us a chance to stop at the San Juan Restaurant for lunch. It just happens to be right out side the Paradise Pond birding area, supposedly a migrant trap. After lunch we went through the park, but found no migrant birds, only a Ladder-backed Woodpecker. From there we went over to the Leonabelle Turnbull Birding Center, which we've visited before. It still had a good selection of ducks, herons and shorebirds hanging out and Ellen saw another life bird, a flock of Franklin's Gulls.
After a stop at Coffee Waves for an afternoon cup, we were off to Rockport to do the weekly grocery shopping. This made for a longer day than usual and we didn't start back to the refuge until nearly 6 pm, usually our dinner time. Seeing as we would get back to the campsite after 7 pm, we decided to just stop at Tivoli and have dinner at Canales Cafe. Friday night is steak night at Joe's Outback. That's an open porch at the back of the restaurant where Joe grilles Texas steaks over charcoal for an inexpensive dinner. Ellen had the six ounce, I had the 12 ounce (they were out of the 8 and 10 ounce steaks), served with a baked potato and salad. They were cooked just right and quite tasty. If we had only known that we could sit out back on the porch rather than in the restaurant.
Saturday was a day around camp. We started out with a morning bird walk. The wind had come around from the north and this often stalls the bird migration at the coast and we were hoping for some migrants. While we saw a fair number of birds on the Rail Trail and Heron Flats trail, they were mostly what we had been seeing all along. The migrants hadn't shown.
Sunday we were to meet Garry and Kate in Rockport around noon, so Ellen finally got in a morning exercise walk. I'd intended to get in a bike ride but it had rained overnight and I tarried a bit to let the road dry a little. But, as I came out to get out the bike, I noticed a lot of movement in the trees around our new campsite. Some of the migrants had arrived. Most notably were Indigo Buntings and Orchard Orioles, new to me. There were also warblers that I couldn't identify and some small birds that I could, Yellow-rumped and Yellow-throated Warblers, a White-eyed vireo. a Carolina Chickadee and even a Chipping Sparrow. Ellen arrived back from her walk and joined in and we saw 16 species between us, just sitting at our campsite.
After all that we headed off to Rockport to meet Kate and Garry. After spending time catching up. we went off to the Texas Maritime Museum in Rockport. It has an interesting small collection, but, important to Kate was the lighthouse stamp. The museum has its own lighthouse, a three story wing with a deck and a harbor light atop it. After spending some time at the sculpture garden at the Rockport Center for the Arts (the center itself was closed by the time we got there) and a drive out to the Allegro Key canal community, we stopped for dinner at Bellino's, an Italian restaurant. It wasn't very Texan, but was pretty good.
Today, we expected to meet Garry and Kate here at the refuge around noon, so we went off for another morning bird walk on the Rail Trail, hoping that we'd find more of the smaller songbirds. It was quite cool when we left, still in the 40's and all was very quiet. We could find no warblers and were about to call it quits when a flight of large birds came over. They were Anhinga, about 75 of them in all and they kept passing back and forth overhead. We hadn't seen any Anhinga and thought that it was a bit far north for them, but later research showed that they do migrate along the coast here. Things picked up for us after that with a Swallow-tailed Kite, a Belted Kingfisher, and Red-headed Woodpecker among the birds we saw.
After getting back to Speedy to warm up with a second coffee, the day warmed up and cleared. We had lunch and Garry and Kate arrived. After showing them around the volunteer area, we drove out to the Heron Flats trail and Observation Tower. We were able to provide a big alligator for Garry and Whooping Cranes for Kate. After a trip around the auto tour loop we headed off to Indianola and Port O'Connor on the other side of the bay, a short direct distance, but a long way to get there. Indianola was the major Gulf Coast port in the late 19th century, but two early 20th century hurricanes pretty much wiped it off the map and Galveston replaced it. It is now a sleepy beach town with a bit of history. We spent much too much time there and never made it to Port O'Connor. They dropped us off at the refuge and we will be seeing them after work tomorrow.
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