Day 1, Sandhill Cranes, southern Texas

Our plane had arrived in Houston, Texas, at noon on 19 March 2019, and then we had a very long drive along the coast to get to Rockport, where we stayed at the Pelican Bay Resort for three nights. A delightful place, with small cabins. Once we had unloaded our vehicle, we went for a local drive, including along Cape Velero Drive. We had stopped the car to look at a very distant Osprey (tail end of which can be seen in the lower, right corner). Then someone noticed that way, way in the distance, there was a flock of Sandhill Cranes (17?) They were basically invisible to the naked eye, but I zoomed in with my camera and took two shots. Terrible quality, but wanted it for the record. I promise my Whooping Crane photos will be much better.

In the evening of 31 March 2019, four friends and I arrived back in Calgary after an amazing 13-day birding trip (19-31 March 2019) to southern Texas! The following morning, I grabbed four photos to give an idea of what kinds of things we saw - four of my better photos, I should add : ) As usual, for me, it was not a trip to photograph just birds, but to capture anything else of interest, of beauty. This included flowers, insects, a few fungi, wild animals, and so on. As always, I missed quite a few of the birds that were seen by my friends. They are excellent birders and spend so much time birding and taking photos, and so are able to spot and capture the tiniest, fastest of birds. I am happy to have seen every bird that I did see! Everything from Whooping Cranes down to a small Yellow-throated Warbler. Unlike on our trip to Ontario and Quebec last year, we were thrilled to see Northern Cardinals close enough to photograph this holiday.

Right now, I can't remember names of places, and I have a huge amount of getting organized with where and when I saw most things. However, I just wanted to let you know I am home, feeling back to being motivated to take photos again, after totally losing interest the last few weeks before we left on this exciting trip.

I used both my old Canon SX60 and my less old Nikon P900 on this trip. The advantage of the P900 is that it has GPS and automatically loads on the map on Flickr. It may not always give an accurate location, but hopefully it will be close enough. Part way through the holiday, it looked like the Canon was taking somewhat better photos than the newer Nikon, so I was using the Canon as my main camera.

I have now downloaded all of my images to my computer. Such a mixed bag - some reasonable shots and others just about as bad as they could possibly be, but I will be posting them on Flickr for the record. Once again, I will post photos in very roughly the order in which they were taken, to help give me a much better idea of just where we went and what we saw and when. Usually, I try not to post more than one photo at a time of a certain bird or flower. However, that hasn't happened so far with my Texas photos! Just wait till I get to the Whooping Cranes - at one point, we got the chance to watch a family of three feeding, giving us the opportunity to take lots of images. Apologies for posting so many photos too often. It took me about 10 months to complete editing and posting from our trip last year, to Ontario and Quebec! I really don't want to take that long this time. I only finished a few weeks before going on this Texas trip.