I was good and Judy was bad. We were supposed to spend the day looking down into bushes and grass for sparrows and wrens. We spent the morning on the fringes of a live-oak forest bird sanctuary. Judy kept looking in the trees. She kept trying to find that Great Horned Owl that hooted hello at her.
We learned a lot about sparrows today. We learned every sparrow that flies away to land on a bush and look back at you is a savannah sparrow. We saw a lot of savannah sparrows today. Every sparrow that is invisible until it flushes from your feet, rockets about twenty feet away and disappears into the underbrush, is every other kind of sparrow.
We learned wrens do not actually exist. We figured out we need the help of a trained professional if we're ever going to get better at sparrows and wrens. That's it! We need a bird coach. We have Rick guide us for a day every time we go flyfishing in
Spent some time on the beach. Marveled at the abandoned car way low on the sand at low tide. It was one of those pretend four-wheel drive cars that got down where he shouldn't have been. I guess that's one way to find out where you should be and where you shouldn't be. His front wheels were still up, but his back wheels were buried to the frame. Time was not on his side. On our return back up the beach, he was still there and the tide was clearly coming back in. There are no wreckers close by. You have to wait for one to come from somewhere else.
Been driving the Jeep all over. It's working well. Guess there is no hurry replacing those worn front tires. I'm keeping a close eye on the tread.
We did well on birds overall. Picked up fifteen more birds here to bring our total for this park to 53. Decided that shorebirds mattered much more than sparrows and wrens. Shorebirds are hard. There are a lot of peeps we haven't figured out yet. They all kind of look alike. I spent some time today making a bird list just for this park, showing only the birds that are here, and the important identification features of each, then arranged it in order of size. I'm ready for those stinking peeps now. By this time tomorrow we'll know every little bird on the beach.
Judy spent the evening with the vacuum, sucking up mosquitoes.
We'll leave tomorrow. Except for the football game. We want to watch the Chiefs play the Colts. They play at noon our time. Hard to get settled somewhere else by twelve without getting up early. Don't want to race the clock after three. We might have to dump the tanks and stay another day.
Updated total bird count: 285. I think there are seven hundred species of birds in the
