Month: February 2018

I’m back in Port Aransas, TX with my friend Susan for my eleventh annual visit.  We’re staying with our friends Rose and Dave in a rental home just a few yards from the beach.  Port A was Ground Zero for Hurricane Harvey and the devastation from that storm is evident everywhere.  There are fewer Winter Texans here than in past years because many of the rental houses are either being rebuilt or are inhabited by locals whose homes were destroyed.  Every street sports gigantic piles of construction debris and there are vacant lots where in past years, homes or businesses stood.  But Port A residents are strong and they are rebuilding with positive outlooks for the future.  Port A Strong is their motto and flags sporting the motto hang everywhere.

Susan and I walked on the beach for the first time Sunday morning.  Dense fog advisories warned that visibility was minimal.  The beach was shrouded in a foggy curtain as we strolled down the nearly vacant beach.  The beach was flat and hard, quite a change from past years.  The piles of loose sand and parts of the dunes were washed away when the 12 foot tidal surge that hit following the hurricane washed back out to sea, taking the loose sand with it.

Despite the changes on the beach, shore birds were visible through the mists and seemed undeterred by the changes on the beach..  Flocks of Willets waded in the surf and my favorite shore birds, the adorable little Sanderlings, raced from wave to wave looking for delicacies to eat.  We also saw a Ruddy Turnstone and flocks of Royal Terns.  It’s good to be back and we’re happy to see the unwavering spirit of the locals.  Port A Strong!

For me, Sanderlings represent Port Aransas so I’m posting a photograph of a Sanderling as my first photograph from this visit.

When the Yellowstone wolf pack (we’re still unsure if it was the Wapiti Pack or the 8 Mile Pack) began to stir and returned to the bison kill, the alpha male warned the other wolves as well as the ravens to stay away.

A few days ago, I visited Effie Yeaw Nature Preserve for the first time.  It is a nature preserve along the American River and I went with my friends Jim and Jack from the Placer Camera Club.  There wasn’t too much bird activity there except for a few turkey vultures sunning themselves atop dead tree snags and of course the ubiquitous Canada Geese because the Nature preserve is part of the Ancil Hoffman Golf Course.  We did see and photograph mule deer, several bucks and does that were not the least bit concerned about our presence.  This doe was just a few feet away off the trail.  I used my Nikon D500 with a 300mm lens with 1.4x teleconverter.

Just a short distance from Old Faithful, other geysers spout, some with more intensity and these days, even more regularly, than Old Faithful.  Here, Beehive Geyser gushes like a giant broken sprinkler head.

 

The Clepsydra Geyser in the Lower Geyser Basin is quite beautiful with golden yellow surrounding its aqua pool.  The colors are sometimes completely obscured by the spray and  mist from the geyser which seems to spout almost continually.  Old Faithful Geyser, which is not as faithful as it once was due to seismic activity over the years that rearranged the plumbing that causes its now semi-regular eruptions, does not have the beautiful colors that Clepsydra has.  The term “clepsydra” refers to an ancient time-measuring device that worked by flowing water.