Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

 

 

Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
Had a very shiny nose
And if you ever saw it
You would even say it glows

 

All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and call him names
They never let poor Rudolph
Join in any reindeer games

 

Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say
Rudolph, with your nose so bright
Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?

 

Then how the reindeer loved him
As they shouted out with glee
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
You'll go down in history

 

 

Okay.  It was a happy ending for Rudolph, and Santa got what he needed.  But what about all the other reindeer?  They were terrible people to begin with.  They teased Rudolph for being different and wouldn’t play with him, and Santa apparently didn’t intervene.  Then when the reindeer discovered that the boss liked Rudolph because he was useful, the suck-ups decided that Rudolph was a hero.  Did Rudolph change?  No.  Did Santa?  No.  What about all the other reindeer that were jerks?

 

Well, the story is set to nice jingly music.

 

Red-headed Woodpecker

 

 

We get to see lots of woodpeckers at home, but not the red-headed, so it’s special when we find him.  Often, woodpeckers just look like this:

 

A silhouette in crummy light and we can’t make out much detail.

 

However, last trip to East Texas, we were able to get a better look with better lighting and got this:

 

A red-headed woodpecker (center frame) shining in the sun!

 

 

 

 

Way cool.

 

Pine Needles

 

 

They’re not all the same.

 

Loblolly Pines.  They’re all over the Southern U.S.  They have medium length needles, maybe 7 inches, in bundles of three.  They look like this:

 

Longleaf Pines, living in roughly the same range as Loblolly, have incredibly long needles.  If you haven’t spent time in the south, you may have never seen pine needles like this:

 

Roughly 15 inches long, also in bundles of three.

 

Here is a baby longleaf.  It looks like a clump of grass.

 

Along the way

 

 

Big Tree.

 

A particularly large Live Oak at Goose Island.

 

There are only estimates of the age.  No-one is going to drill a bore hole in it to count the rings.  Best guesses range from 1,000 to 2,000 years, so that tree was already ancient when the first Europeans arrived in North America.

 

 

The rare, endangered Whooping Cranes

 

 

It takes a long lens to get a shot of them standing around in a big grassy field.

 

An adult pair with a youngster.  The little ones are hatched in the Northwest Territories in Canada, where the cranes summer, and have to grow up fast to fly with their parents for the migration to their wintering grounds here on the Gulf Coast.

 

Occasionally the adults get up and swoop around.

 

Striking birds, about as tall as Judy, but with a much greater wingspan.

 

 

 

Their population reached a low of 15 to 20 birds in the 1940s.  This year there are over 500 birds in the wild, with more in captive breeding programs.  It has been an intensive conservation effort for 80 years to achieve this success.  They are still in real danger, because they only live naturally in two places in the wild.  They migrate between Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Canada, their breeding grounds in the summer, and Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas to winter.  Their summer grounds are so remote it was many years before anyone could figure out where they went.  They would show up here on the coast every winter, then disappear all summer.  There are a couple eastern populations that have been established as a buffer in case a natural disaster wipes out the primary migrating flock.  Still a tenuous existence.

 

 

Happy Birthday, Judy

 

 

77.

 

I didn’t get to take the day off and baby her all day as I’d like.  (Well, I did get to make her morning coffee and a breakfast taco, but then I had to go to the computer.)  I’m digitally at a conference through Wednesday, finishing off my continuing education for the year.  Maybe I can be nice to her all day long on Thursday to make up for it. 

 

Happy Birthday, kid, and thank you for spending your life, and all your birthdays, with me.

 

 

Normally

 

 

On a day like today.  We’d close the door and turn on the air conditioning.  It’s 85 degrees outside.  But after a few cooler days it would feel like sacrilege to reject such a nice temperature, so the door stayed open and the air conditioning off no matter how hot it got in the house.  Another front pushing through tonight, so it will be a few days before we see temperatures in the 80s again.