Estero Lllano Grande: A Feast for the Eyes

 Blue-winged teal, drake in flight. Ahhhhh. That's such a singular blue on those lesser wing coverts. And I always forget that they have a brilliant green speculum, so taken with their shoulders am I. Frozen in flight by my Canon 7D, with its 70-300 IS L series lens. The rig of my dreams.

I was already getting tired of winter. Ohio has turned almost gray, with heavy rains and winds ripping the leaves off the trees. So it was a delight to come down to south Texas for the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, to bake our blanched bodies in warm sun, to feel the tropical breeze, which rapidly became a warm tropical gale.

Our first stop was Estero Llano Grande. It was Liam's birthday, and we wanted to spend the whole day together doing something we like to do. Birding. Butterflying. Paraqueing.

A Teleus longtail on Eupatorium (closely related to my lovely mistflower).

A clouded skipper. I think. Texas butterflies are a tad tricky for me. Mexican stuff, tropical stuff, stuff I never see. Makes it even more fun.

Bougainvillea. I miss my bougainvilleas. Had them in the greenhouse for years. They finally got too ungainly and sparse. Maybe this year. If we ever get the greenhouse done...we're looking at Saturday for our next series of roadblocks and heartbreaks. Or maybe even completion. This project has made a hardened pessimist of me.

White peacocks were everywhere.

Nothing subtle about this one--the  guava skipper, an uncommon to rare (even in So. TX) tropical species that's dependent on plantings of guava for egglaying and caterpillar rearing. Wow. Look at that helmet.

The orange headlights are a nice touch, as are the blue striations on thorax and inner forewing.

It was a difficult bug to photograph, because it liked to hang upside down. I like this one. It looks like a guy in a butterfly suit.

We smiled at the clambering antics of plain chachalacas, the U.S.'s only member of the cracid family. It's a guan. I still can't believe we have a native guan. How cool.

Though they bear a superficial resemblance to grouse, turkeys and chickens, they aren't galliformes. They're something much more primitive, stranger. Perhaps a very early (as in Cretaceous) proto-galliform.

When I saw a horned guan atop Volcan Atitlan, I knew I had seen something primitive, something elemental, something irreplaceable.
Noisy as they are, chachas are beloved by Texans.

Om nom on the orange.

A Cooper's hawk wished for an unwary chachalaca, green jay or dove.

One of my very favorite photos of the trip: a mottled duck in flight. Egad, look at that speculum. Note that it lacks the conspicuous white trailing edge to the speculum that mallards show. Though it superficially resembles a black duck or female mallard, the mottled duck is a separate species, Anas fulvigula, distinguished by a highly contrasting pale head and neck. Sexes are alike. This bird doesn't migrate; it's a subtropical resident in Florida and Texas. And boy, is it beautiful in flight.

I guess the highlight of the day, and the trip, was the moment that Bill jokingly offered the kids $50 to spot a paraque (easier said than done). This tropical nightjar is extremely well-camouflaged on the forest floor, where it rests all day after a night of moth catching. Within seconds, Liam pointed at his feet. "There's one." And within five minutes, Phoebe had one located in the woods. Holy cow. Harnessing the power of kid eyes. We were very, very proud of our youngun's. No biggie, right Liam?

Phoebe has been genuinely bitten by the birding mosquito, and if his dedication to cross-country (another of Phoebe's passions) is any indication, Liam will likely follow suit. She's all ate up about birding. Shh. Don't tell her how thrilled we are.

Liam clocks out now and then. Every brand-new 13 year old gets to clock out when he needs to. Especially on his birfday.

Phoebe's paraque.

And Liam's. We'd never have seen them but for the kids.

All hail Estero Llano Grande. What a place, what a beautiful place it is. It was so wonderful to be together as a family on this special day. Wearing shorts and feeling the warm wind lift the hairs on our arms. Mmm.

Fun on Biolab Road

A young roseate spoonbill greeted us as we turned onto Biolab Road.  What an alluring name for a road!

                                This is what a black vulture does when it's really, really windy.

I like how he's using his tail as a brake, and he's clinging for all he's worth to the snag. Vulture feet are not strong in the clutching department, which is why they have to carry prey in their beaks.

Black vultures are a Florida fixture, and they call southwest Ohio their year-round home, but they're still pretty unusual to see in southeast Ohio, where we live. I have a feeling it's only a matter of time before they completely colonize my area. We have roadkill aplenty. You could live on roadkill around here, if you wanted to. Which I do not.

Bill had told me that Biolab Road was a must-see, and we were not disappointed. Phoebe said it led to the beach, and that seemed like a meet adventure for a mom and two cubs...drive down the road and wind up on Cape Canaveral's beach. We drove and drove, rolling slowly along, taking in the incredible wildlife along the way.

The kids loved the reddish egret, especially when I told them that birders call it the "drunken clown" for the way it staggers about in the shallows, following the lightning-fast movement of schools of fish which only it can see.

It throws out its wings for balance, making a spectacle of itself. To someone who doesn't know that it's fishing, it looks crazy, possessed, drunk.

And then it plunges its rapier bill straight down into the water to stab at little fishies.

 A far more placid feeding style distinguishes the roseate spoonbill. I felt incredibly lucky to be able to show this bird to my babies.

The spoonbills are more filter feeders, running that great appendage through the silt and snapping closed on whatever lives within.

They swing their great heads side to side, slowly sweeping through the shallows. 

They make pass after pass in an unconsciously lovely ballet.

Earlier in the day, we'd lucked upon a preening group of spoonbills along Black Point Wildlife Drive in Merritt Island NWR.  I quickly deployed the Leica scope and camera to digiscope their sickly green heads, ruby eyes and glorious crimson shoulders.

Could there be a much more convincing link between the dinosaurs and today's birds?

It was not much of a stretch to imagine duck-billed dinosaurs snapping to attention at the approach of a pack of Deinonychus, especially for Liam.

So long did we watch and admire the wading birds and snoozing gators that it finally became clear that we would never reach the beach before dark

and we decided that that was fine with us, because what could be better than this pastel sunset, with us all breathing the salt air, appreciating the heartbreakingly beautiful color. Color has been gone from our lives for months and months. We decided that all our color had drained down into Florida. We're very anxious to get it back, as rainy day follows rainy day and the crocuses struggle to bloom.

Phoebe snapped me in pursuit of egrets

and I snapped her in pursuit of sunsets

and it was all dreamily beautiful. We hated to see that sun sink, but it was kind enough to go behind some cutout palm trees, delighting Liam who thought it was time for the pterodactyl to swoop through, cackling, at any moment.

A snowy egret punched a white hole in the inky marsh as we said goodbye to another Florida day.

All landscape and car interior photos taken with  my Canon G-12, chunky little point and shoot genius box.

Take a Kid Along

Lots of birdies were preening this gorgeous sunny morning at Viera Wetlands. We started out with coats and quickly molted as the mercury rose to 70. A moorhen arranged its feathers, unperturbed by its own tomato-red schnozz. This is one of my nicer Leica-digiscoped images. Thank you, Leica!

Phoebe got downright bossy about digiscoping with Daddy's Leica scope and camera; she'd done some digiscoping with him on their trip to the Space Coast festival in January 2010.

"You're too close. Move back. Wait, you'll scare them. Stop here."  That kind of thing. 

It was the transformation I saw in Phoebe after that trip with Bill that made me decide to take both of the kids this year. When she came back after only a week, it was as if she had grown an inch in stature and a foot in self-confidence. Much as I wanted to give Liam his own experience in Florida, taking them both was the right, the only thing to do. It worked out beautifully. They moved as a single unit, never lonely, seldom bickering, supporting each other and me.

I was proud to introduce them to my friends. If you take your kids lots of places, they learn how to travel. If you integrate them into your social groups, they learn how to mesh with others. Start 'em young and they'll get the hang of being present without being a pain.

 The world needs more Shoom, anyhow.

And every Shoom needs to see an eight-foot reptile hauled out and sleeping by the road. Gators and manatees were the draw for him, and Florida delivered!