January 5, 2005

• The throat thing is mostly over. I'll be ready to travel back home real soon now (as they say).

  Xmas brought me the opportunity to buy a new camera, so I did.

  And I took it with me yesterday to the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Reservation, with my sister and my dad. They're avid birdwatchers, and while we didn't see any prairie chickens (the public is kept away from that part of the reserve), we did see lots of species I never thought I would.

  I was most impressed by the birds of prey, since they're big and cool and sexy and so forth. We saw harriers and caracaras and the ubiquitous TVs and BVs (turkey vultures and black vultures). One white-tailed hawk. Probably some others I can't remember. Also ducks and herons and phoebes and all the birds you expect to see in the coastal plains of Texas. Here's what the coastal plains of Texas look like:

  

  There are some tiny birds in that tree, but you can't really see them. Did I mention, the Texas coastal plains are FLAT?

  

  There really aren't any decent pictures of birds, since I don't have the kind of lens that would allow such things. If anyone wants to supply me with a 300+mm lens, I'd be happy to go back and shoot some more pics. But there was one bird that was still long enough for me to get a few good pictures...

  

  The irony here is that the bird is a shrike, which is a species that takes the bugs it catches and impales them on thorn bushes and barbed wire in order to come back later for a snack. This shrike got entangled in a wild rose bush and couldn't get back out. My sister pointed it out to me. She has an eerie ability to find birds in trees. Even dead ones.

  The other irony is that this little bird died a claustrophobic death in this wide open space:

  

  • 12:03 am
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