Day 13 - Something I Forgot

That something was the wind on the Texas Coast. It has been blowing hard out of the south all day. When we spent the winter at Aransas, we got blown around in Speedy and on the bikes every time we went to town. Away from the coast (and on the coast) it is mostly flat and open and the winds seem to be either from the north or south...but we are going west. New Speedy is taller and longer than the old one and it gets smartly moved around by the wind. Fortunately, it has much better steering.

We spent another night at Bolivar Flats beach. It was pretty windy, warm and humid, but dark and quiet...aside from the wind and waves. We made an early start and took the ferry to Galveston. It is a large free ferry that runs between the Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston. It is run by the Texas DoT as it is considered part of the coastal state highway. There is quite a bit of traffic early in the morning running in both directions.

Each ferry is six lanes wide and takes about 70 vehicles. They normally run two ferries during the day, but they have six. The last time we took it (in the other direction) is was a sunny late spring Sunday and we waited in line for an hour while they were running all their ferries. This morning there was about a ten minute wait for the ferry to arrive...but it was nearly full when we left a few minutes later.

After a stop at the well-stocked Kroger's supermarket in Galveston for a fairly major replenishment of Speedy's larder, we were back on the road west. This is when we hit the open inland countryside and the winds. One first stop of the day was at Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge. This is primarily a wildfowl refuge with lots of ponds and marshes for wintering ducks and other water birds. Most of the ducks are gone now, but we did an abbreviated drive of their auto tour loop and found quite a few Blue-winged Teal and good numbers of Northern Shovelers and Black-bellied Whistling Ducks. The whistling ducks breed here, so they are to be expected at this time of the year.

There was also a good selection of coots, herons, egrets and shorebirds and we ended up with 31 species in all including a large group of Black Vultures landing and jumping around in the tall grass. We couldn't see what they were feeding on, but it must have been something sizable as we counted 10 of them.

After having lunch on the refuge, we continued on to tonight's stop, Quintana County Park, just behind the beach in the town of Quintana...and just in front of an enormous LNG facility. We were a bit dismayed as we passed through several miles of large chemical plants which bordered the town and port of Freeport and as we approached Quintana there was this enormous construction site. It is an LNG terminal which is being rebuilt.

It was originally built about ten years ago to receive imported shipments of liquid natural gas, as Boston still does at its LNG terminal in Everett. But it was obsolete from almost the time it was built as there is now no need to import natural gas into Texas. They have more than enough already. Enough to want to export it, so the terminal is being rebuilt as a shipping facility.

As an aside, the reason that we get foreign LNG imported into Boston is that there aren't enough pipelines to transport abundant domestic (and cheaper) natural gas into New England. So, Boston gets a significant fraction of its gas from places like Siberia. Ironically, the gas that gets shipped out of Texas probably won't end up in Boston since the Jones Act doesn't allow foreign vessels to trans-ship between US ports. and there are no US-flagged LNG tankers.

Back to Speedy's travels. The county park is fairly small, pleasant, and the view of the LNG plant is minimal, although it is quite humid and warm at the moment.

As we entered the park, we were a bit dismayed by the entrance sign. The person in the park office said that they were not currently that bad, but we are keeping the windows and doors closed this evening.

After checking in, we drove back out a couple of blocks to the Quintana Neotropical Bird Sanctuary run by the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory. It is a tiny wooded lot, but just about the only woods in the area...and right on the coast. It is just the spot for trans-gulf migrants to drop in as they make landfall. As it was mid-afternoon, we only spent a short time there and saw about a dozen species, but it is supposedly a great spot. According to the GCBO, 39 species were seen there today and they reported nearly 70 earlier in the week.

After our short trip to the sanctuary, we settled in to our site, plugged in, turned on the air conditioner and went off to take a couple of well-needed showers. After a bit of cooling off, we had a nice dinner of fresh roast chicken (roasted by Kroger's) with a nice salad (made by Ellen) and fresh french bread (baked by Kroger's).

Our last bird siting of the day was probably the best. I was looking out the window of the van and saw a bird sitting in the gras about 25 yards away. It looked like a Killdeer but was facing away. There was an obvious Killdeer pecking around just in front of it, but it was much smaller. What was the larger bird? Ellen and I got out out the nice cool van to take a better look. The large bird moved. It was a Killdeer and it was accompanied by three tiny chicks in identical plumage.

There is rain and a front moving through overnight and the humid southerlys will be replaced with north winds. With luck, this should bring in the birds tomorrow and Sunday.