Goodbye to Earthwatchers

Saturday, February 21, 2016

On Saturday morning,  we returned to the volunteer building for breakfast and then helped Lindsay and Jeff round up all of the supplies and food which they had brought for the expedition.  After breakfast we walked to the Visitor’s Center where Deb bought a whooping crane patch and I bought a pair of vermillion flycatcher earrings. Lindsay purchased a couple of tees that changed color in the sunlight.

Back at Hopper’s landing, I went to the outhouse in search of the tree frog that visited. I wanted to take a photo of it. The outhouse was actually a very nice, clean, and better bathroom than the one in our cabin, containing a real toilet and vanity/sink. Early on, Mike reported two tree frogs in it. The first time I visited, a tree frog was on the side of the bowl. It jumped to the wall under the t.p. When I turned around to flush the toilet, it was already on the lid. I shooed it off and shut the lid so the frog wouldn’t get trapped. But at this visit . . . I did not get a photo. Seems that the frog only visited at dusk or after dark.

After packing up and loading the car, we all posed for a farewell photo with the bay behind us. I took a photo of the group, minus Barb, my roommate for the week (see below) but Jeff took a last photo of the whole group which I have not seen yet.

Jeff, Ken, Lindsay, Mike, Mary (seated), Dick, Terri, Deb, Sue, Ellie, Jean before San Antonio Bay I am taking the photo and Barb was still packing. That’s the bar porch behind Jeff, and the dock between Mike and Bill. 

Then Deb and I said our goodbyes to the scientists and our fellow citizen scientists and headed back into the Reserve for some birding and photos. We went back to Jones Lake and tried to go to Hog Lake, but it was closed. It had very little water in it from what we could see. Deb managed a photo from the car of caracara (right) and some more shots of the teal and grebes at Jones Lake, but we really discovered little that we had not photographed or seen before.

Top left clockwise: Least Grebe, Green-winged Teal, Pied-billed Grebe, Blue-winged Teal; Photos, Deb Hirt

We stopped in the picnic grove, ate our lunches, and then turned on the navigator and headed west toward Corpus Christi and Laguna Atascosa, a coastal refuge we had visited two years ago when we birded South Padre Island, TX.

A happy tree at the picnic grove in Aransas NWR

The drive to Laguna Atascosa was a trial. We ran into detours and closed roads which confused our AI navigator to the point that we were directed in miles-long reroutes on small unmapped roads through wind farms and plowed fields. When we finally found the road to Laguna Atascosa, it looked as though it had been bombed. I wish I’d had taken a photo of it. The craters were so large and so deep, that four-wheel-drive vehicles had carved out a high-centered alternative on either side of the “main” road. Of course, I am in a low-slung Prius so could not travel these. So, we crept for miles along the cratered road at 10 to 15 mph, stopping often to figure out the best route around the craters, some of which TX DOT (I assume) had attempted to fill with yellow dirt and gravel.

When finally we reached Laguna Atascosa, we had about an hour of daylight, the Center was closed, and the bathrooms were all under renovation, so the Refuge had thoughtfully lined up a row of porta-potties off the parking lot. Before we’d even gotten out of the car we heard the green jays. I know I’ve just spent a paragraph whining, but even an hour of daylight was great here: In that hour we saw, White tipped Doves, Green Jays, a Great Kiskadee, an Olive Sparrow, Catbirds, Long-billed Thrashers, Black-capped Titmice, and a Golden-fronted Woodpecker as well as cardinals and other “usual suspects.” The golden-fronted woodpecker was a lifer for me. The light was not good for photo-taking, but Deb did manage a couple of pix. See her photos in the top row below and a few from the Internet beneath them.

I’ve included a photo I took with the cell phone of some of the green jays below, and Deb was kind enough to send me her photo of a rabbit that came to the water hole and drank and drank beside the birds. The blurry cell phone pic of three green jays just to show how plentiful they were.

We were in a real fix when we left Laguna Atascosa because it was dark, we had not reserved a motel, one of the Prius’s headlights was out, and we were irritable with hunger. Of course we had to get out on the same cratered road we’d driven in on, and we were faced with the same multiple detours. We pulled in to a Super 8 Motel in San Benito, TX, at 9:30 pm. It had been an exhausting day of driving for me and I was disappointed that we were less than an hour from South Padre Island but could not take the time to bird it. Deb needed to be at work on Tuesday and we needed Sunday and Monday to get back to Stillwater.