Day 2, Turkey Vulture / Cathartes aura

I LOVE Turkey Vultures. I'm not sure that my friends feel the same way about them, but I am thankful for the chance to photograph this one on Day 2 of our South Texas trip.

Day 2 of our 13-day trip to southern Texas started off early in the morning. A glorious sunrise made this early start very worthwhile. It happened while we were driving north along highway 35 from our lodging at the Pelican Bay Resort in Rockport, and passing alongside the Aransas National Wildlife Reserve. In the same location, we saw a beautiful Crested Caracara perched along the edge of the road on a very ugly utility pole. The Caracara is one of my favourite birds. So different, so impressive.

We didn't drive all that far before turning round and coming back south, driving a few of the roads closer to the Copano Bay Causeway. There, we visited The Big Tree, 1,000 years old (some websites say 2,000 years), and a beautiful tourist attraction. We saw so many oak trees in all sorts of places on this holiday, but The Big Tree was 'king' of them all. So magnificent, with its twisted limbs. Driving a few roads near The Big Tree, including Lamar Beach Road, we saw Laughing Gulls, Roseate Spoonbills, Whooping Cranes, Egrets, American White Pelicans, etc.. I can't tell you how thankful I am to have a camera that has GPS. Without it, I would have no idea where we were!

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, as well as three dolphins, and Bluebonnets (flowers). Unlike on our trip to Ontario and Quebec last year, we were thrilled to see Northern Cardinals close enough to photograph this holiday.

One of my biggest thrills was actually not a bird, but a tiny Horned Lizard that I suddenly spotted maybe a foot away from my feet. I had missed seeing one here in SE Alberta maybe four or so years ago, which was so disappointing, but this more than made up for it.

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 more.

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 some of 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.