The Missouri Botanical Garden has an amazing water lily collection.
Pizza size water lily-immature:
Mature Victoria Water Lily
Blogging certain of my images that might be of interest to others. More information and less personal than FB.
The Missouri Botanical Garden has an amazing water lily collection.
Pizza size water lily-immature:
Mature Victoria Water Lily
Publishing this after a several month hiatus caused by a technical issue in WordPress due to permalinks.
Some preliminary views of comet Neowise seen from our deck.
Following is similar view, taken with a “LiPo” filter. A little more green, but we shed the orange cloud glow.
We didn’t anticipate that our outdoor kitchen would be high enough to be in the tree canopy (ok, Central Texas, scrub oaks and junipers, not really that high). As a consequence, we get many visitors to the feeders at sunset. Here are a few:
Scrub jay is quite adept at flipping up to eat from the underside of the suet feeder.;
Then we have a domestic scene involving a pair of Painted Buntings.
I don’t remember the last time we had over an inch of snow, much less 6 inches! Last Sunday (10 Jan 2021) brought 6 in of snow to Leander TX and surrounding area (but Austin, 20 miles south, only got an inch or two). Here are some scenes..
Our yard art.
Deck art with a couple of views over the valley.
A wider view of the valley. Snow helps to highlight the ridges in thisEastern Texas Hill Country view.
The obligatory snowman. Guess who.
Cedar tree covered with snow, not pollen — that’s a good thing!
As an experiment, I’ve added a gallery of the images above. I have to think if it adds value. Maybe this is the best way to display the EXIF data?
We recently spent a week or so in Port Aransas, but had to find non-beach activities as the beaches were closed due to COVID-19 crowd management. Here are some images I thought would be interesting.
We took an fishing trip in Aransas Bay and Copano Bay with a great guide #CharlieLummos. He even stopped the boat for some sunrise shots.
This is another sunrise shot from the fishing boat; we later fished around that structure (and some structure Charlie happened to know lay on the bay floor there). I believe I took a sunset photograph of the same structure, back in February during the birding festival.
Following is a photograph under the Copano Bay bridge at Rockport, TX. The old bridge used to be open to fishing, but Hurricane Harvey put an end to that.
Now for something completely different. You have to look carefully at what is going on at the top of the pole, sure a helicopter is amazingly (dangerously?) close to the pole and wires…
…but look closer, there is a worker on the platform attached to the chopper. Some job, not for me!
And, when they finish one pole, move to the next. At least he gets a good breeze on a hot day! It seems they are attaching the lightning wire at the top of the pole. #LCRAHelicopterWorker, #skyhookneeded.
After that excitement, we settled down to Martinis,and watching an imaginative grackle drink the AC condensation dripping from a neighboring RV…on the fly, literally!
Finally, at the end of the day, a trip to the birding center. A bit late, most birds settled but our friendly alligator was there watching.
EXIF data for the featured image:
RIP Christo. He and Jean-Claude did work at a monumental scale that always made me think: how can they organize something that massive for the sake of art? Here are some of my images of their work called “The Gates”, from NYC Feb. 2005:
Cold February morning in NYC, but many were there to watch.
Not everyone was there for the art.
What an unexpected way to warm up Central Park in February!
“The Gates” stretched throughout Central Park, here in front of the Met.
A stroll through the gates in the park.
Here is a link to the CNN writeup on Christo: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/christo-artist-dead/index.html.
Aloe Vera: who knew it blooms? Apparently our outdoor kitchen aloe vera is happy in its corner, blooming away:
And we kept the citronella plants from the deck in the greenhouse all winter, they got leggy, but they’ve bloomed! After some pruning, citronella starters in progress — look for them at a Leander Garden Club plant sale near you soon.
As part of their ongoing tribute to health care workers during the coronavirus pandemic, the US Air Force Thunderbirds did a flyover of San Antonio and Austin this week. The Austin leg started in Leander and we were there to see them.
Their spotter apparently buzzed our neighborhood and got a lot of attention on Nextdoor.
At first that was the only jet we saw, then the team showed up:
And passed over us:
Finishing their loop over Leander/Cedar Park.
They gave us a spectacular view of their precision flying.
While attending the 24th Whooping Crane Festival in Port Aransas, we took two trips by bus, to the King Ranch and to the Nueces Delta Preserve, the latter including an extension trip to the Hazel Bazemore County Park.
While we were looking for birds, we chanced on some of the famous King Ranch deer. Apparently these deer remain in rut as late as February. Or not; it’s not clear how interested this doe really is.
My spouse’s main goal was to see the Green Jay. Success! The first one at Hazel Bazemore, the second image from the King Ranch the next day.
She was also eager to see the Audubon’s oriole, this one at the King Ranch:
Of course, these two species, with the ever present Northern Cardinal, make a stop-light image, again at the King Ranch.
Another species seen at both feeding stations: Golden Fronted Woodpeckers.
Immature Vermillion Fly Catcher trying to blend with the rusty post.
Which is harder, to focus on a bird in flight or on a bird in the brush? Here are a Green Heron and a juvenile Cara Cara, both in brush at the King Ranch
One more deer image, sneaking past a pair of roosting Cara Cara. As the tourists say: “those Texan bald eagles sure are small”.
And we have to give a huge “thumbs up” and shout out to our guide, Tom Langscheid, Wildlife Tours Specialist for the King Ranch. He did his MS at Texas A&M Kingsville, when he studied the seasonal changes in bird communities on the King Ranch, so he was pretty much the ideal guide on this trip. We even got to see that Indiana boy herd some cattle!
At end, EXIF data for featured image.
We recently attended the 24th Annual Whooping Crane Festival in Port Aransas, Texas. Highlights included a boat ride to view the whooping cranes resident at the Aransas Wildlife Refuge, a more local boat ride in the bay to photograph more birds, and birding expeditions to the Nueces Delta Preserve and to the King Ranch.
Below are some selected images from the trip. My next post will focus on the King Ranch and Hazel Bazemore County Park photos of upland birds.
First, the sunrise. When we arrived at the Nueces Delta Preserve, we were greeted by golden-hour view of some Snow Geese.
Of course, the stars of the show were the Whooping Cranes, seen after a long boat trip, to the Aransas Wildlife Refuge, on a very grey and dismal day. Good that the ride was the Mustang Catamaran, it smoothed out the rough bay waters.
We visited the ARK (Animal Rehabilitation Keep) at the U. of Texas Marine Sciences institute. Here are a few of the resident birds:
Keeping with the aquatic theme, here are a couple of the many turtles at the ARK, a Kemp’s Ridley and Green Sea Turtles.
While the ARK rehabilitates and houses many raptors, the cages were dark and impossible to photograph through with the sun on the wire. Here are a few in the wild seen on the excursions:
We got some some less typical views of Great Blue Herons. Seen on the photography-focused bay trip:
Then there was the Black Crowned Heron, seen at the Port Aransas Birding Center:
Surprise, also at the PA birding center, a pair of Whooping Cranes has taken up winter residence since Hurricane Harvey.
Finally, a sunset from the bay boat cruise near Holiday Beach, to close the second day. .
At the end, EXIF for the title image of the Whooping Crane in flight.