Black-bellied Whistling Ducks

 

 

You can’t see me.

 

Right?

 

Collared doves

 

 

 

Assessing the yard.

 

Sand patterns

 

 

A buffer behind the dunes, built up at great effort with tractors and loaders; dunes which are then elaborately sculpted by the erosion of wind and rain.

 

 

 

 

I saw a statistic

 

 

It said:

 

“Men are twice as likely as women to have a hearing problem,

but only half as likely to admit it.”

 

What?

 

Okay

 

 

It’s gnarly trees again.

 

 

 

We looked at blackbirds

 

 

First, we found a place with plenty of them.  The grain silos around Progresso are a good place to start.

 

 

A lot of them were red-winged blackbirds.

 

 

There were brown-headed cowbirds.

 

Bronzed cowbirds.

 

And our target for the day, the yellow-headed blackbird, in the center of this frame, to the right of the pole.

 

He was being reclusive.

 

Follow-up on Sal del Rey

 

 

 

It’s a lake with no outflow and an underground, 4-million-ton, salt dome right beneath it.  The salt is from the Jurassic period.  This area was part of the Gulf of Mexico back then; that’s where the original salt came from.  This is not the only salt dome around here, it’s just the one that geological conditions exposed.  Salinity in the lake is 10 times that of the ocean.  Seasonal rainfall determines how wet or dry the lake is.  It’s pretty white right now.  We haven’t had a rain lately.