March 22, 2020

 The shelves  at our Walmart where there should be cases cases of water, soda, etc.

And these are the empty freezer shelves.


  The Corona virus has caused so much panic that there is  a  big shortage of food in the stores.

We are asked to stay home to prevent the spread of the disease so no travel  and no photographs for us  this week.

Also, tomorrow I go to the hospital to have my left knee  operated on (total knee replacement) so I will be unable to get about for even longer than  the week, so I guess I will not be ;posting again for some time.

Thanks for reading my blather.  be back soon, I hope.

March 10,2020

I have never seen a stranger looking bird than the Roseate Spoonbill and I am sorry that I don't have a better photo than this to show you.  Sometimes we see one or two on  a small pond  but yesterday we saw these on a strip of land in the middle of a large area of shallow water.  They are a really ugly bird up close but from a distance, the bright pink color is so pretty.  Up close you can see  a large patch of yellow around the eye,  white neck, black on the back of the head and grayish bill with some darkish  stripes on a bill  that looks like someone pounded  it flat.    They really look like a small  child  designed and colored them


Image from the internet..the rest are my photos

Anyway,  it occurred to me to  write a little about peculiarities of some of the birds that I have photos of.  I know, that is ending a sentence with a preposition.😧

  

White Ibis.  Legend says it is the last to leave before a hurricane strikes and the first to return.  Some also believe that it can withstand the winds of a hurricane.         

The golden fronted woodpecker can eat prickly pear cactus.  Sometimes his face is stained a light purple from it.

Cattle egrets eat insects and can  get 50%  more food and use 2/3 less energy by following cattle and sort of cleaning up  the insects in what remains in the path .   A group of egrets can be called a stampede of egrets.  Seems inappropriate.

Great Blue  Heron:  he has some special feathers on his chest that he combs with a sort of fringed claw.  He uses the feathers he has combed off to clean himself from the slime of the fish and other unpleasant stuff.  He/she also has a special  way of incubating  their eggs by standing on them to keep them warm.

I grew up in a time when it was thought that only man used tools but since that time we have learned that a number of animals do use them including this green jay who sometimes uses a twig to pry bark  loose to get insects underneath.

And finally:a Cardinal.

  There is a saying that if you see a cardinal you are seeing a representative of someone who has passed .  They show up at times when you most miss them or need them. 

I'd like to believe that.

March-3-2020

                                                 This is Big Padre

He is 12'6"

He lived in Port Arthur living the life......waiting for the fishermen to throw the entrails of the fish they had caught overboard.

 Until one day, Padre saw a boat come in and he rested his head up onto the side of the boat.  It wasn't an aggressive act but a friendly begging episode.

 Unfortunately  it was a visitor to the area and the fisherman, understandably concerned, reported the incident.  

So the alligator had to be taken away.... but lucky for him, he was taken to the Padre Island Bird and Wildlife Center which is where I photographed him.  

The good people  there saw that all those days of easy food had gone to his waist and as a result they have the poor devil on a diet and they tell everyone about it...how embarrassing.

  The food police are everywhere!

.

New this year are some Tortoises  at the Wildlife Center.

I read that they like greens and other veggies and occasionally some meat but should not be fed every day.  Skip maybe one or two days..  Some species can even go for 2 years without food!

So why does the wildlife place sell  leafy greens to any visitor that wants to feed  the tortoises but visitors  are not to feed  poor 12 foot  6 inch long Padre the alligator ?

What would you title this next pic?  Tag, Your it?  Git off my rock?

See how the top one appears to be smiling and the bottom one looks very angry?

I called it bullygator.  Or unhappy marriage

I have seen on TV floats like this called dangerous because they  tip over easily in the wind.  Also if the wind takes them out a ways in the water, there is no way for children or anyone for that matter  to bring them back in without getting out of the thing and haul it while swimming.

So, I was surprised when I saw these two floats at the beach today.  It was a windy day as most are here in southern Texas in the winter.  I watched, hoping nothing bad happened.

sure enough, both floats tipped over and both children are in the water with mama trying to right the floats and help the kids.  They took the floats back to the beach.

Good idea

This is Neil standing next to a Texas sunflower.  The blossoms are not what you think of as sunflower..they are much smaller, but the plant can get very tall.  Neil is about 5'10".  Fallow fields can be loaded with these, it's pretty even if the blossom is not as big..

Life explained

Feb 25,2020  9pm cst

 For weeks we have seen this sign for Chucky's Racetrack in Rio Hondo and I would laugh because I  pictured something like this:

Or maybe Chucky Cheese AND movie Chucky

But finally we got the time and courage to go down that long dusty road thru a less than prosperous neighborhood and found that it was actually a place where horse races are run on Saturday
and Sundays...  I could hear the announcements (in Spanish) but we were there at the very end of their day.

Maybe next week.

After being awed  by Elon Musk's accomplishments at Boca Chica, we discovered that the Fine Arts Museum in Brownsville has a Musk display consisting of professional photos and art work concerning Musk' work and life that was very nice but  what took my attention mostly is his timeline of what he thinks will happen in the near future....er  if   you call the next 100 years "near" future.  Sorry, it's a little hard to read.

Spent a bit of time at the wildlife  places this week..saw this indigo snake.  .  Now I hate snakes more than any animal, bird or other living thing including some people, but he has one redeeming feature,.   he  has what is called a kinetic jaw. He has some really stretchy ligament s in his jaw that allows him, (and other snakes as well)  to work his mouth open very wide .   sp, he can  and will take in a whole rattlesnake.   Of course, this takes a pretty long  time but he just keeps drawing him in.  I understand that Santa Ana has none or few rattlers as a result of the good work done by this otherwise creepy black slithering scary guy.

 

How long has it been since you have seen one of these?  For you under 20 year olds, its a public phone that doesn't use WiFi, doesn't  have  camera possibility and  charges you extra if your call is  for a out of town. number.  You turn it on buy giving it money.
Why did they always put them right at the edge of a busy highway...the noise made it nearly impossible to hear.

The very large fields of vegetables here in the Rio Grande Valley are mostly picked by people, not machines.  That means that the 234  million pounds of onions that I mentioned here before were all picked one at a time.  So you will be happy, I know, to hear that  these updated port a potties have a feature I have never seen before...a little sink to wash hands and sanitizer to use as well (not seen in the pic, but on the other side)at the edge of the fields.

There is a road on SPI that is not developed, just a road and sand dunes and the wind carves really beautiful  patterns in the  sand.  That is , all sand with no one making any adjjustments to how the wind forms patterns.  No two  places the same.

But not much longer.

February 14, 2020-

What I find most disturbing about Valentine's Day is, look, I get that you have to have a holiday of love, but in the height of flu season, it makes no sense.

                                                             Lewis Black

We are within 30 miles or so from SpaceX and this is Starhopper a test vehicle for the eventual use in Elon Musks plan to populate Mars and carry supplies into space.

It can carry about 100 people into space...,,,for a price

So, after driving thru about 20 miles of this  

And seeing this about one half mile before the SpaceX complex

we arrive at SpaceX

Such a simple sign attached to chain link fence.  Shouldn't there be flashing lights and  maybe marching music here?  Its so much more amazing and available for the humble masses like me than ....say.....Harry's Diner. .... or ... Share the Road signs

They are putting the rings together and then it  will be loaded on the top when assembling the rocket... 

 Riveting work...sorry...bad pun...Im a sucker for them.

I am putting these pictures in to show the wildlife refuge and undeveloped land on one side of the road and the high tech spaceship construction on the other.

So far the road is open to public if one is willing to make the trip.  The road is closed however when testing.  

And then there is the whole question  of what will happen to the people who live in Boca Chica village  just a  ways down the road when the road is closed.  Musk has tried to buy the houses at three times the value and with several perks  thrown in, but it was a limited time offer and as far as I can  tell, the homeowners are not selling.

So the reason for all this on Valentine's day is no matter what you love, may it bigger than life dreams like populating the moon or more ordinary things  that entertain you like this yard with a  centilllion birdhouses

or whatever these dolls hanging off telephone poles are, don't let anyone talk you out of pursuing your passion

Altho I can't imagine someone waking up in the morning and saying, I think I will put potted plants in children's minicars and line the driveway with them, I admire that they did it.

Hoping Valentines Day was sweet and chocolately

February 5,2020

Sometimes when I take a ;picture that I like but the color is off, I just keep altering it and I kinda liked the results on this one.

Last time I forgot to include some things from previous years that are worth mentioning and  remembering.

Janice called me one day and said the cutest little puppy followed her home that morning and she can't find out where it came from.    After she told me over and over how cute it was and that it was lost and no one is claiming it, I agreed to take him home with me and try to find a home for  him.   We called him Mookie after one of Neil's favorite baseball players.
Mookie stayed with us for about 6 months.  We  found a lady who placed homeless dogs and she found him a home with a 9 year old boy and a backyard.  It is an anonymous adoption so we were never able to check on him, but we hope he is happy and well.  He was adorable but very active and a small camper is no place for a spirited puppy.

And I thought i should mention that for his birthday last year  Janice gave Neil this Parasailing experience, which he loved.  I  kinda hope she doesn't love me quite that much to give me a heart stopping experience of hanging many feet above the ocean supported only by a few strings attached to a couple of yards of  silk and being dragged along by a speed boat.  Maybe just a nice bottle of wine....I'm easy to please.

 what is it?

Saw this young man jump out of a car at the park, grab his skateboard and speed across the parking lot to the public bathrooms, but it just made me cringe because he is barefoot.  I would be slowly placing my feet down carefully so the rocks wouldn't hurt and I wouldn't stub my toe. 

 I love fish but when I see them like this where boaters bring their catch in and have it filleted, I feel like it is wrong.

Any chance you couldn't see the sand on the road?

 Onion field. There about 9,500 acres of onions grown in Texas each year

 resulting in about 234 million pounds of onions.  

The  picture above is the foot of a tortoise.. Did you guess it?

I have to tell you  a story:  Couple of years ago we were at Boca  Chica  and Janice was quite away down  the beach from us.  She called Neil and  said she had found this turtle on the beach floundering in the tide so she picked it up and took it in to the water a bit to help get it past the rolling surf, but it kept washing in again.  She did this a couple of times.

So Neil waded in  further and dropped it but still it rolled in .  He did this maybe 3 times.  We thought the turtle must be exhausted by this time so we called the Turtle Rescue place on 

South Padre Island,  The lady asked if the turtle would draw its legs up into his shell..

I said Yes.

She said then it isn't a sea turtle.