All Things Great and Small

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The tragedy unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, where oil is choking wildlife and killing bays and estuaries, sickens me and makes me angry.   I keep thinking  of Coleridge's albatross (in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner") that was so wantonly destroyed by the unthinking mariner. When the mariner destroyed the innocent bird of the poem, the seas turned into a nightmare and it's that image I envision in the scene of oil and fire at the site of the fallen rig:

"About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue, and white."

Yesterday I posted a photo of a Great Egret we saw on its nest at dawn in the Everglades this spring.  In honor of the birds of the Gulf  Coast from here in South Texas (where thankfully we are not affected by the spill) to Florida I'll post some of the other pictures I took on that trip.

Here is the most fascinating bird of our trip: a Wurdemann's Heron, which is a hybrid of the white color morph ("Great White Heron") of a Great Blue Heron and a regular Great Blue Heron.

Can you see the Great Egret sitting on the nest just behind this nest?  If not, click to enlarge the photo.  It's like one of those "how many birds can you find?" drawings.  


The "Wurdemann's Heron" looks like a Great Blue but has a white head.  On our way to fish for tarpon the fishing guide took us by a mangrove island rookery where he knew a Wurdemann's Heron was building its nest.  We approached slowly, using only a trolling motor, and did not disturb any of the birds.  Of course these photos are taken with a zoom lens so we were not as close as it looks.

 In breeding plumage, all the birds were at their most beautiful, especially this Tri-colored Heron I photographed  when we were kayaking in the Everglade's "River of Grass."  I'm used to seeing these guys fly by in twos and threes along our Texas coastal river, but this one was so close I could admire its two-toned blue beak. 

This is the same Great Egret as the one in the photo of my last post.   Its plumes are not showing as well, but the green at the base of the bill is amazing. The color changes during spring breeding season are among nature's most beautiful miracles.

The red bill of the White Ibis is another amazing coloration.

The few American White Pelicans we saw were probably not breeding.  They for some reason had not migrated as the Florida white pelicans do.  We have a flock of white pelicans in our area in South Texas that remain for the summer also.  I see them in the bays sometimes when we are fishing.  I read last week a post on Texbirds that described one being hit by one of those large wind turbines that are along the coast north of us.   The fishing guide in Florida thought these two guys were probably too weak to have migrated.  I wonder if they will survive the summer.

It's the pictures of the Brown Pelicans covered with oil that are so heartbreaking in the news of the gulf oil spill.  As we saw this beautiful bird in breeding plumage on the mangrove islands of the everglades, we already knew that oil was spilling into the gulf and we were hoping that somehow the birds in Louisiana could be safe. 

Another bird we enjoyed seeing in Florida was the Osprey.  This one was nesting on an electrical pole near Chokoloskee Island.

Birds were not the only creatures we saw in the bays and rivers of South Florida.  Here a Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle comes up for a breath and a peek at our boat.

Seeing a hooked tarpon jump was exciting, especially to my husband the fisherman. Click to enlarge this photo to see the fish  in more detail.

 

Our vacation to see the Florida Everglades, to fish among the islands and paddle through mangrove tunnels
and along the quiet and beautiful "river of grass,"  was a wonderful week of stunning landscapes and fascinating wildlife.  I cannot imagine oil covering and killing this beauty, but of course that is exactly what is happening in other parts of the Gulf of Mexico and it is because of the carelessness, and yes the greed, of humans.

I keep thinking of Coleridge's ancient mariner.  His story is of a man who took for granted the wonder of nature.  As he tells the story, the mariner finally learned a lesson:

"He prayeth best, who loveth best; 

All things great and small; 

For the dear God who loveth us;

He made and loveth all."

It was his punishment to wander from land to land telling the story of the death of a beautiful and innocent bird at the hands of a man who was not evil but who was thoughtless and unaware of his actions.  Coleridge tells us that the "wedding guest," to whom he recounted the story, woke up "sadder and wiser," but I wonder if he really did.  I wonder how many environmental disasters it will take for us to be any wiser.

An Obsession of Pelicans

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It is almost impossible to look toward the river these days and not see a pelican.  Brown Pelicans fish along the river all day long, sometimes flying so low that their primary wing feathers barely clear the water, and sometimes rising high into the air and then plunging into the water beak-first, twisting as they dive and popping up facing the opposite direction. In a previous post, I noted that a group of pelicans is called a squadron, a pod, a scoop, or a pouch.  Sometimes I think that the collective noun for my pelicans should be obsession, for that is what they seem to have become for me!)

The pelican in the photograph above floated for awhile after its dive, spinning on top of the unusually still water that reflected a nearly perfect inverted image.  About five minutes later,  two other pelicans flew by at medium height, in their flap-flap-flap-glide, flap-flap-flap glide rhythm, and the bird joined them.

I wrote about the pouches of these ponderous birds a couple of weeks ago when I began looking specifically at the colors of the adult pelicans in their breeding plumage.  The feathers of their heads have turned golden on top and  dark brown on the back of the neck.  I'm still looking carefully at the pouch color of every Brown Pelican I see, trying to determine how many of them have the red pouches usually attributed to the California subspecies. (The pouches of the  Atlantic subspecies that you would assume birds here on the Texas coast to be is usually a brown or dark olive color.)  I see one such bird with the red gular pouch at least once a day -- but only one bird a time--which really doesn't tell me how many there actually are. The pelican in the photo above, taken from our dock, has the red pouch I'm talking about, opened wide just after the bird has scooped up a mullet. Stretched like this, the pouch is not quite as dark red at it appears when the bird is at rest, but you can nonetheless see that it is redder than the pouches of most of our Texas Brown Pelicans.


Last Friday we took the boat out, heading a few miles downriver toward the Laguna Madre, the "Mother Lagoon" between the south Texas coast and South Padre Island.  I counted Brown Pelicans as we went along, losing count a couple of times but seeing at least fifty.  Only one of the birds we saw was red-pouched.

That's it in the back of the picture below, behind the one that has its head straight up, stretching its beak and pouch. I read that they do this stretching exercise to keep their pouches supple for scooping up meals.

 

These guys, lined up on a neighbor's dock,  must be tired from making so many of those twisting, turning plunge-dives. 

 

I've noticed an apparent  range of sizes in Brown Pelicans.  Notice how much larger the one on the right seems to be than the other three. 

 

This one reminds me of one of those old fashioned decorative doorstops---you would pick it up by the beak and prop it in front of the outside door to keep the wind from slamming it shut. 

Not only have the Brown Pelicans gone through their seasonal changes in appearance, but so too have the American White Pelicans.  In late winter they grow strange fibrous bumps or keels on their upper beaks.  The color of the beaks change from yellow to pale pink and then bright orange. This white pelican floated placidly in the river not long after the the departure of the brown one pictured at the top of this post.  Notice the river water is rippled now.  It seldom stays as glassy still as it was early that morning.

On our boat trip downriver (we never made it as far as the bay) we scouted out not only pelicans, but other wading birds as well.  A Long-billed Curlew waded in the shallow water along the edge (above).

A small group of  White Ibises caught crabs in a small inlet.   (The collective noun for a group of ibises is a congregation or stand or wedge.  I'll say that we saw a stand of ibisis.  These guys were standing but also hopping and shuffling and probing in the shallow water for small wiggly crabs like the one grasped in the beak of the ibis in this photo. Click to enlarge if you can't see the crab.You can tell it has just been caught because the churned up bubbles are still on the surface of the water. )

The Arroyo Colorado,  once an ancient tributary of the Rio Grande River, is now surrounded by agricultural fields. Below the Port of Harlingen it has  been  dredged and widened  for use  as a shipping channel off the Intracoastal Waterway.   But small inlets and "old Arroyo" loops remain, wonderful places to ease a shallow-water boat into or paddle a kayak along.  A narrow border of native scrub along the edge retrieves for a small space a remnant of  habitat that once extended across the valley.

Sitting quietly in a boat in the shallow waters of a little inlet, you can watch a stand of ibises catch small wiggly crabs and pretend the arroyo scrub forest extends for miles and miles beyond the river.

A Pouch of Pelicans

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When you were a kid, did you learn that poem, "A wonderful bird is the pelican/His bill will hold more than his belican..."?
I can't remember who wrote it (though I do know it wasn't Ogden Nash) or how the rest of it goes, but I do agree that the pelican is a wonderful bird. On days like today I find that silly rhyme running through my head.

I've spent the day watching Brown Pelicans. I love to see them fly over the river, watch for fish, and then dive in the water with a twisting motion, hitting it hard enough to make a loud splash. Sometimes two or three pelicans will be fishing together and dive at almost the same time. As they enter the water, they fold their wings and go in beak-first. The twisting motion must continue underwater, for they always come up facing opposite of the direction they went in. They slam in hard and come up fast. If their dive is successful, they stretch their throats upward and you can often see a fish filling out the pouch before they swallow it. Mullet and menhaden fish are their preferred food (according to what I've read) and we definitely have those in the arroyo. (Menhaden are the silver "shiners" that fishermen net up for bait, and mullet are the silvery fish that jump out of the water, sometimes in a series of three or more leaps. People don't like to eat either menhaden or mullet, but the pelicans certainly do.)

Yesterday the bird in the photo above made a loud splashing dive just out from the dock as I watched from the porch. I wasn't specifically looking for pelicans and at first I paid little attention to it. But something seemed different about this bird. I kept looking at it, first as it ate the fish it caught in its dive and then as it paddled around for awhile. I noted that it was in breeding plumage, a yellow/gold on its head and dark brown on the hindneck, but that wasn't the difference I was sensing. Lots of the pelicans I'd been watching for the last couple of weeks had that.
It wasn't until I looked at the photos I'd taken that I realized what didn't seem right: its gular pouch was not dark brown or gray as most of the Brown Pelicans I see, but a surprising red. I checked several field guides. Most didn't even mention this coloring at all, but the couple that did identified it as a fieldmark of the pacific or California subspecies. This guy might be a long way from home! I don't know how many of "our" pelicans have this coloration--but it is beautiful!

Today I watched for Brown Pelicans all day so that I could get an idea of how many had the red pouch--and I only saw one. It may be the same one I saw yesterday, of course. I saw dozens of the birds flying and floating and diving but only one that looked the same as the photo above. I'll keep watching. Tomorrow we may go out to the bay where there will be many more birds to compare.

One last Pelican note--while reading about them on the internet, I found out that a group of pelicans is called a pod, a pouch, a scoop, or a squadron. I especially like the last two designations. I've seen White Pelicans fish at night on the river, strongly paddling in a v-formation, scooping their beaks back and forth in the water almost in unison, "herding" the fish to the birds in the back. That was definitely a Scoop of Pelicans! Tonight I saw a scoop of 34 pelicans, and at last I got a (rather fuzzy) night photo.

What does this look like to you-- a Pod, a Scoop, or a Squadron of Pelicans?

Night Windows and a Morning Feeder-Dance

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Last night I sat down in the living room after dark to start writing a blog, but soon became distracted by the arroyo night framed in windows across the room. The fishing light was making a circle of green on the river. The far bank was gathering light and casting reflections of upside-down trees, bank, and fence onto the still water. The image of sky in the river was black (opposite of what it is now: silver gray against the deep green of daytime shadows). I could see both real trees, grass, and banks glowing in the light cast across the river and, just beneath them, inverted reflected ones. At the edges of the windows all was black.
Suddenly, great white forms began moving through the picture as dozens of American White Pelicans streamed by, their unseen but powerful feet moving them through the circle of light as they paddled upriver. We counted 93 in all. I moved closer to the window and watched until they were out of sight.

A few minutes later a Barn Owl flew over the river going in the opposite direction, its white breast and wings shining a ghostly white against the dark sky. (I've heard that many legends of ghosts in graveyards stem from the Barn Owls that could be seen flying at night out of the church steeples where they lived next to the graveyards.)

I used to see Barn Owls in holes along the banks a couple of miles up river where we fish for tarpon and snook. But last week when we looked for the Barn Owls, we saw that large portions of the bank had caved in, probably because of all the rain we've been getting, and the holes had collapsed. I took a picture of one hole that looked almost big enough for owls, but I could not see any owls peering out as I used to. I think the owls sometimes enlarge these old kingfisher nest holes for their nests and sometimes use cavities that emerge among roots of trees when the banks cave in. I'll keep looking this spring, and maybe I can get a photograph.

Here's what I had intended to write about last night. When the oriole/hummingbird feeders were covered with bees earlier in the week, I took them down for a day and then replaced them with a less bee-friendly kind. So far the bees haven't returned, but the feeders are "humming" with activity: hummingbirds (the little Ruby-throated/Black-chinned and the larger pugnacious Buff-bellieds), orioles (the Altamira pair and the single Baltimore that is still spending his winter vacation with us) and Orange-crowned Warblers seem to be even more active in the cold mornings. Yesterday I watched the Altamira Orioles, an Orange-crowned Warbler and a Buff-bellied hummer take turns at the nectar. If the orioles were on the feeder, the little warbler waited on the railing of the deck or perched atop an old wooden oar, while the hummer waited in the fiddlewood. All remained within two or three feet of the nectar feeder. They traded places by turns, it seemed, and so quickly I couldn't keep up with them with my camera. As I lifted the camera to snap the oriole, I'd look through the viewer and see a warbler! Even a Black-crested Titmouse took a turn. (The photo here is obviously not from today; you can see the titmouse is at the other feeder, before the bees laid siege to it a few days ago.) From my warm place inside the house, I enjoyed watching the feeder-dance for a good part of the morning while the birds switched places, bobbing and weaving, as though choreographed.




Update (February 18, 2010): This morning, in the rain, the dance of the nectar-eaters resumed. This female Yellow-fronted Woodpecker was not as polite in awaiting her turn. Though not as graceful as some of the other participants, and certainly not as patient, she was able to get her share of sugar water.

the north wind doth blow...

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We've had several days of first rain and then cold. Not freezing cold, but uncomfortable cold (highs only in the 50's), with wind and misty dampness. I do my birding and photographing from the window on these days. The pictures of the soggy Northern Mockingbird and the Northern Cardinal were taken Saturday when we received almost three inches of rain. It was still warm then, but gray and wet and windy.


Monday night the clouds had cleared and the night was warm and still, finally quiet enough to hear the Hoo-Hoo-huh-Hoo of our Great-horned Owls and the trilling of Eastern Screech-owls. Tree frogs peeped and coyotes called each other across the river. I stood on the porch and enjoyed South Texas night sounds.By midnight, however, a "norther" had blown in.We woke to hear the wind howling outside in the trees and whistling at the windows. If a norther comes in during the day, you can see it coming with blue-black clouds building quickly from the north. (That's why some people call it a "blue norther.") But at night it can seem to slam into the house without warning.

The birds in the yard and on the river act differently and look different in this kind of weather. They look fat on cold days as they sit in the trees or on the dock, their feathers puffed up to trap warmer air next to their bodies, kind of like we do when we wear down coats I guess.
(The Great Blue Heron in the picture is having a bad hair day as the north wind blows and ruffles its feathers into unusual forms.)

When a front blows in and the wind is so cold from the north, American White Pelicans come further upriver and we see them on the river especially at night. Though it's dark now outside the windows, I just saw at least fifty of the large white birds stream by , their wings beating slowly but powerfully over the river. (With wingspans of 100+ inches, American White Pelicans are noticeably larger than Brown Pelicans, the smallest of pelicans.) In this picture, taken on Christmas eve, hundreds of White Pelicans were overhead as we fished on the dock. They "kettle" on warm currents of air just as migrating hawks do.

I wish I knew how to take photographs of the pelicans under the fishing lights or swimming on a moonlit night. They remind me of wax candles glowing against the black water, their rippled reflections inverted in the water. I keep trying to capture that image in poetry since I can't with my camera.

Pelicans at Night

As the moon spilled
into dark water,
shimmering candles
gleamed on the river.
White birds,
carved of wax,
flamed up
from black water
and vanished
into the night.