Thursday.
The Wood Duck has landed!
Got our ten hours. Got to the Bluebonnet Swamp, just as it opened at nine am. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? Having to wait for a swamp to open? This swamp is a city park. It has a headquarters and exhibits and staff. Maybe it is an elusive duck after all. Our search involved considerable debate at the swamp headquarters about whether the wood duck is actually there right now at all. Seems they can’t always tell. After three hours of searching the swamp, we finally spotted them. We got to see a whole bunch, but never any one for very long. They were only in one place, way back between the trees, paddling around in a little open spot of water. We couldn’t spot them at all with the naked eye. We only saw them by staring through the binoculars at just the right spot, at just the right time, until one swam past the field of view. Once we saw them, though, we got a really good look and got to watch them for as long as we wanted.
Victory! This is what we came for. We came for wood ducks. We got wood ducks.
The Bluebonnet swamp is a young swamp. It wasn’t always a swamp. Two hundred twenty-five years ago, it was a creek. Settlers here shifted some land around, inadvertently changed the water flow, and voila! A swamp was born. The high ground is an oak ( and whatever else kind of tree) hardwood forest, just like it always was. The swamp land is Cypress and Tupelo Gum trees (picture). No pictures of wood ducks. They were a little too far away for that. Would have needed a camera mounted to the birding scope.
We saw other birds too. We saw cormorants, great blue herons, great white egrets, snowy egrets, killdeer, turkey vultures, red tailed hawk, red-bellied woodpeckers, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, eastern phoebes, blue jays, Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, American robins, northern mockingbirds, brown thrashers, cedar waxwings, orange crowned warblers, yellow-rumped warblers, and northern cardinals. The wood ducks, red-bellied woodpeckers, and Carolina chickadees are all new birds for us.
We can’t quit thinking about Lake Murray in Oklahoma. When Judy checked in, the camp-host told her it had been raining all day, but that the lake didn’t have any streams emptying into it, so we didn’t have to worry about flooding. OK. It doesn’t have any streams emptying into it. Let’s see. It doesn’t have any streams emptying into it. We can’t figure out where all that water in the lake came from then. It’s a big lake…
Wow. We found the wood duck. Now what? What else is there to do?
A zero mile day in the motorhome. Not very far in the car either.
