§ I Love to be Beside Your Side...

...beside the sea, beside the seaside, by the beautiful sea.  I love living by the sea!!! The sights, the colors, the sounds, the sand, shells and wildlife, the salt air fragrance, the tranquility and even the storms creating turbulence [of course, from the land, not out on it...lol]. Sometimes, when I am out walking; day trippin', when I feel like just walking, I head out to the water...And most times I find peace within. The sea does that to me so very often!!!

Surfing School



Crashing waves!

The seagulls laughing and enjoying life, glad to be alive, surviving the day, even if we humans invade their territory!  Sometimes I think we should do as nature does...just be.  Forget everything.  They aren't called laughing gulls for nothing!!

The colors and the quiet times of the early morning hour!


Wild grasses on the dunes just off the shore dancing in the breeze!


A man and his best friend!


The picturesque foreground and the still horizon!

Incoming!!!  Soon, the crew will be at the dock, selling their catch of the day to those waiting with their pockets full of cash; shrimp on the barbie tonight for dinner!

...and of course, a favorite pastime, watching ships from foreign lands leave for places unknown, or coming in to port with their imports.  Oftentimes I wonder how lonely it can be far far from home.

§ Birding Texas 101

Y'all know by now, that when I take my day trippin' travels and share photos, my main purpose is to head to my destination to tally my steps for the day and to take in some birding. Well, over the last year, I have taken, literally, tens of thousands of photos of birds. Some, I have shared on my bird photo blog, while others,  saving them for record keeping. My record keeping is just that...each photo is dated, so when I go back into my archived folders, I know which birds are in my area in that month. Some migrate of course, while most are year 'round residents of South Texas. I thought I'd take one photo from each month's photo record and publish them on Day Trippin' for a change of pace. These frames were added before I changed the template, eliminating my blog's sidebar, and redesigned the frame to a simpler one. [I also have chosen twelve for 'nature' of each month in 2019 to be published at a later date]. Here goes. Birds for the month of:

January 2019 - Brown Pelican



February 2019 - Crested Caracara



March 2019 - White Winged Dove



April 2019 - Reddish Egret

[below, is a white morph, there is a dark morph also which is aptly named and more common.] This particular white morph is in breeding colors. Note the pink and blue on the face...just when breeding. Also, the open wing stance is called a canopy and is believed they do this when hunting for food to shade the water surface for better visibility.  Guide books and websites will tell you this is the only bird that will canopy when feeding, but I have seen egrets doing the very same, and have recorded it with photo proof.  Did the egrets evolve to this behavior also?

May 2019 - Chipping Sparrow



June 2019 - Fledging Northern Mockingbird



July 2019 - Northern Cardinal in molt.  Molting takes place after breeding and takes weeks to regrow new feathers.



August 2019 -Tri-colored Heron



September 2019 - Great Blue Heron



October 2019 - Summer Tanager

This is a female, the male is all red. Sometimes sighted are dappled yellow, orange and red...the dappled is anywhere from 1 year to adult plumage.

November 2019 - Green Jay

Interesting fact - I kinda secretly tend to call this the "mockingbird of the jay family". If not careful, you may think you hear a hawk [or several other bird calls, sometimes it sounds like a cat's meow] calling from the trees, then to discover it is the green jay!!  They are only seen in South Texas, rare sightings.  Mainly a bird of Old Mexico.

December 2018 - Herring Gull

Herring Gulls are one of few gulls that have yellow eyes. There are literally dozens of different gulls around Texas, and sometimes, if lucky, a rogue from another part of the States or Caribbean will visit. At first, they're difficult to ID at times unless you know specific anatomy and colors to associate.  For instance wing markings, eye color, leg color, size, breeding colors, bill shape and markings, like the ring billed gull.  Guess what?  It has a ring around its bill!

[Corpus Christi had a Bar-Tailed Godwit show up in our parks and bay area... from Britain, a few years back.  And birders were literally FLOCKING -pun intended- to our town with tripods, cameras and binoculars; from all over USA and close by foreign lands.  Of course, I was too]  Bud, at times, went with me to help locate it among the local godwits ... and once he made reference to the showing of so many 'crazy' bird watchers it was like the movie [based on a non-fiction book of the same title] The Big Year -starring Steve Martin and other well-known names.  It was, and oftentimes is just exactly like the movie.  If you've never seen the movie it's a good one.  Fun, funny, educational, well written and directed.  And if you do decide to watch it, you will see a bit of me in it too.  Not physically, but me as one of those fanatic birders.

§ What Are the Odds?

I'm going to begin and end this post with some things.... odd ...

...at the Botanical Gardens, well hidden beneath a cactus plant...a rock!  Instantly, to me, it seemed like a human mask [Phantom of the Opera, kinda sorta?].  It's natural....not painted....I got down on the ground, and checked!!!

...a piece of rotting tree branch at Paradise Pond...I saw the heart of it all!

...slime covered oyster shells.  The odd thing was, for me, the distinct odor of rotting seaweed.

...what's odd about this?  Nothing really, except I don't know what kind of flower this is.  Oh, and there is a teeny tiny 'odd' bug on the petal.

...two things odd about this...first the fact I stood still long enough to get a photo of this snake!  I HATE SNAKES!!  Second, the leaf is heart shaped?  Odd something of beauty such as a heart can be near something so terrifying to me.  [Yes, it's caught a fish]

...odd!  What did this gull get into?  Oil?

...seeing double?  That's odd...so did I - There are two katydids mirrored [coupled] on the chain link fence.  [you may call them cicadas]

§ White Shifting Sands...

After I left the turtle hatchlings [link] at Malaquite Beach on North Padre Island, I took the 'back' road from the parking lot. With a sole purpose of birding. Some time ago, when Bud and I drove the area I took, we saw Bobwhite Quail. So, naturally, I take that exit instead of the parking lot exit. lol Well, in the golden light of the early morning, I didn't spot any quail - BUT...I saw two white tail deer. They looked young...one had new antlers in velvet. Naturally, they no doubt spotted my car long before I saw them. They were grazing on all the green grasses! And it IS green. Usually, by mid-July the dunes and surrounding area are parched and drying...

After stopping to photograph the pair, I headed out of the federal park land with a short detour onto another park road that traverses through the dunes to another beach access. Again, looking for birds. No special sightings; year 'round residents, gulls and pelicans. Railroad vine and sea oats dotted the landscape...

...one last pit stop back on the park highway, a duck pond with a duck blind. Looking out the peep holes, some of the turtle watchers were leaving and the white sand along the dunes lit up the backdrop...

§ Rockport Texas

On Tuesday Morning, the forecasted, predicted, high temperature along the coast was 93 degrees in Corpus, and in Rockport [north of Corpus Christi by 30 miles] it was to be around 85 degrees. I thought it has been nearly a year since I've been to Rockport's beach park, so I hopped in the car and drove up to the area. Now, I drove through the main street in town on highway 35 a couple of times heading to Galveston and Goose Island, but since Hurricane Harvey last August [last time I was at the beach park was July 2017] I have not been in town. Boy, once off the highway, I was again shocked...all my familiar landmarks were/are gone!! The art center, so many sculptures and icons IN the park grounds...gone! The covered pavilions [3 of them]...fenced off...too much damage done from Harvey - and of course human lives/homes/and livelihoods take precedence over park repairs. Anyway, it was a beautiful morning, and I easily walked my 10K steps within the park's boundaries. On the far north side of the park, Rockport officials along with the park administration cordons off a vast area to protect the breeding grounds of shore birds and migratory birds that come here to raise families....right now, for the most part, the three species busy making preparations for the upcoming events are sea gulls, terns, and skimmers...

I took pictures:

After this park and my walk, I drove to Linda Castro's Sanctuary, stopped at the Demo Gardens and Tule Creek Trail...had lunch, stopped at the grocery store in Portalnd and then back home. After my shower I was ready to relax, read my book [Mrs. Sherlock Holmes], fix dinner and watch NCIS's season finale...[by the way, this year's 22 episodes have been greatly disappointing!!!]