Month: February 2017

One day while in Texas, Susan and I drove to Aransas Pass to visit friends.  Aransas Pass is on the mainland so to get there from Mustang Island where Port Aransas is, a ferry ride is required.   The ferry is part of the  Texas Highway system.  It crosses the deep water channel where massive tankers sail to Corpus Christi so a bridge cannot be built to span it.  I’ve been on the ferries many times and I am always impressed with the efficiency of this ferry system.  The pilings surrounding the docks have changed since my first visit.  Instead of wooden pilings, they are now massive clusters of what I suspect are concrete wrapped in something and now decorated with guano from the gulls and pelicans that find them inviting.  As we pulled away from the dock,   I took a photograph of a juvenile brown pelican resting comfortably  on the pilings.

I’ve been thinking a lot about sanderlings the past few days.  I fell in love with them on my first visit to Port Aransas in 2008 and still find their antics compelling.  On my most recent visit to Port A, I didn’t see a single sanderling on the beach…or anywhere there for that matter.  It  made me sad because there were very few shore birds of any kind on the beach.  I saw a single ruddy turnstone and a single willet. And just a handful of gulls and terns were in evidence.  I think there were more grackles on the beach than any other kind of bird.

Here’s a shot at a sanderling looking at me.  I took this on North Padre Island near Port Aransas in November while “beach panning,” laying flat on the beach.  I was hoping to do that in Port A last week but the weather was either too rainy or too windy and in any case, there were few birds to photograph on the beach.  I’m going to Florida next month to try Beach Panning again.  I hope I have better luck with finding birds to photograph.

 

Over the past ten years, I have accumulated a huge cache of shells from my annual visits to Port Aransas but what’s on the beach there is unpredictable and never the same day to day let alone year to year.  Sometimes what washes ashore is a single variety of shell, sometimes a few different kinds, sometimes they’re whole, mostly they’re broken.  On some days, there are no shells at all on the beach.  On my first visit to the beach last week, the tide was exceptionally low and the sand looked smooth and as if there were no shells at all.  When I got near the water, I could see that there was mostly one kind of shell, the tiny coquina.  It’s a small clam, no more than a half inch, with shells in all kinds of colors.  When they’re just a shell, and the clam is gone, they lay on the sand looking almost like butterflies.

I belong to a Facebook Group called “Birds of Texas” because I visit Texas often (last year I visited Texas three times not counting my storm chasing adventure) and photograph birds while I’m there.  To post a photograph on the group’s page, the photograph must have been taken in Texas.  I usually post there once or twice when I’m there.  Last week I posted this photograph of a grackle with a coquina in its beak on the beach at Port Aransas.  I called it a Boat-tailed Grackle.  I was corrected by a member of the group.  It is a Great-tailed Grackle.  I learned the difference is the length of the tail  and the shape of the head.  The Great-tailed Grackle’s head is flatter than the Boat-tailed Grackle’s.  I also learned from comments on my photograph that to find grackles on the beach in that area is very rare so what I witnessed was, as I suspected, an unusual occurrence.  The person who corrected me apparently resides in the area and drove to the beach to see for himself what I had documented.   I don’t know if the grackles’ fondness for coquinas is also unusual but I find the behavior fascinating.

Based on the look in this sheepshead’s eye, “Hope I’m not a keeper” is what I imagine is going through his mind as he is reeled in from the jetty at Port Aransas.  I’m not sure if Susan or Paul caught this one but whoever it was, this sheepshead was thrown back so he lived to be caught another day.

The tide was extremely low Monday morning on the beach on Mustang Island.  It was so low that the sandy sea floor ripples were visible around this Royal Tern.

 

 

The brown pelicans and the cormorants were hanging around the Port A jetty where the fish were biting.   They flew off as I approached Susan and Paul as they fished  on the jetty.  

 

Or should I say my friend the fisherlady?  My friend Susan loves to fish.  Our friend Paul invited Susan to fish for sheepshead with him off the jetty while Rose and I walked on the beach.  Just as we got back to the jetty, we watched Susan reeling in a sheepshead.  I’m impressed that she removed the hook herself and held up her prize.  It was a keeper.  We had it for dinner.