Its fall and the foliage of the Bald Cypress trees on Caddo Lake in Texas have turned the color of Burnt Sienna. Caddo Lake is home to many different types of water fowl including Great Egrets like this one flying to the shallow edge of the lake to hunt.
The sunrise at Caddo Lake was vastly different each day. This is from our second morning there. I think it was the most spectacular sunrise I’ve ever seen. The colors were so intense and so vivid it seemed almost otherworldly.
Garlands of Spanish Moss cling to the branches of Bald Cypress trees and cascade almost to the water in Caddo Lake, a maze of slow-moving bayous, wetlands and backwaters. Spanish Moss, which is neither Spanish nor moss but a type of bromeliad, is ubiquitous in Caddo Lake and in much of the Southeastern part of the US. In my mind, it defines the bayou along with the Bald Cypress trees to which it clings. Yesterday morning, Captain Rich took us to a part of the lake we hadn’t visited and there were far more birds than in the parts of the lake we saw in our first two days here. Great Egrets, White Ibis, and Great Blue Herons were everywhere. Great Blue Herons would pose on posts for a brief time as we drifted up to and past them but when Captain Rich shifted gears with a ker-thump, off they flew. This GBH posed on a fallen branch, not a marker post, and with the drapes of Spanish Moss as a backdrop, it is the perfect representation of a bird of the bayou.
Uncertain, Texas is the gateway to Caddo Lake, that hauntingly beautiful place filled with a watery forest of Cypress whose exotic silhouettes and their reflections dominate the morning sunrise. Uncertain is certainly the place to be if you’re hoping to see the fiery colors that fill the sky and that spread across the water as the sun slowly lifts above the horizon. If you’re lucky, like we were yesterday morning, the stunning colors will last seemingly forever, and even deepen, until every last hint of red finally vanishes. I didn’t think the sunrise could be any more stunning or breathtaking than on our first morning here. I was wrong. I have barely caught my breath again.
Sunrise on Caddo Lake, with its bayous, wetlands, and ancient cypress forest, is spectacular. The lake straddles the border between Texas and Louisiana. We’re staying in Louisiana but our daily boat excursions are on the Texas side of the lake. We launch with Captain Rich well before sunrise when it is still dark. Yesterday morning, there were scattered clouds but remants of the moon and quite a few stars were still visible at our 6AM launch. The temperatures were mild and so was a pleasure to sit aboard the pontoon boat and photograph the gorgeous views surrounding us. The intense color of the sky remained well after the sun appeared above the distant hills so I continued to shoot the sunrise after it rose above the horizon.
We’ve given nicknames to many of the Kodiak Brown Bears we’ve watched over the years. Each visit we seem to encounter a bear with some unique (to us) behavior patterns. Snorkel Bear was a huge mother with two COYS (cubs of the year) whose preferred method of catching salmon was to wade into the deep part of the river at the bend, dip under the water, and then watch for and capture salmon in her huge clawed paws. We rarely saw her out of the water and her cubs were not yet old enough to venture into the water so they watched and waited from the shoreline, usually hidden in the undergrowth. Snorkel Bear waited patiently for us to drift by, then she dipped her head under the water, emerging seconds later with a fish clutched in her paws. Sometime she ate it and proceeded to snorkel again. Occasionally, she’d share with her cubs. But her cubs seemed to be thriving and she kept fishing for them. I hope we’ll get to see them next spring.
The endearing Kodiak Brown Bear that we watched several afternoons as we motored back to camp in our boats, the one that draped itself over a shelf along the river’s edge, up off the shoreline but in a position to watch all that passed by, moved to the water’s edge on our last evening there. It slowly waddled to the edge of the water and began to sip from the river, watching us as we drifted by. Revisiting these photographs, only a few weeks away from seeing them in the flesh (the fur?) I can’t wait to return to see how they’re faring. Such magnificent creatures.
The Kodiak Brown Bear cubs seemed to improve their fishing skills with each passing day. On our last day out on the Uganik River that runs through Kodiak Island, the cubs seemed to snag a passing salmon most of the time. It was amazing to watch them fixate on a salmon’s fin protruding from the water and then see the bears splash through the water after their prey. The huge splashes they made would seem to have obliterated what they were fixated on but they somehow managed to find what they were looking for displace the big splash.
The Kodiak Brown Bear cubs were so irresistibly adorable and curious about us. They were not frightened or even wary of us. Rather, they often approached to the edge of the shoreline to get a better look at us as we motored by in our flat-bottomed boats. That’s mama bear in the back behind the reeds. Maybe that’s what gave this little one the courage.
As we motor boated back to camp on the Uganik River on Kodiak Island, Alaska late one afternoon in September, we kept pace with a mother Kodiak Brown Bear and her cub. We watched them from our boats on the water as they watched us from the shore. In this image, both were staring directly at us as we slowly motored by. Most of the time, though, just the cub stared, unable to keep its eyes off us. The mother bear apparently had more experience with Homo sapiens than her cub and she seemed unconcerned.