We boogied across here to Houston to visit the kids. We saw a few prong horn antelope and lots of longhorn cattle. Else, the drive was pretty uneventful.

We went grocery shopping at an H.E.B. in Corpus Christi. There was an open freezer case filled with frozen – solid whole pigs that were piled haphazardly just as the last folks who dug through it left them. We passed on that!

Even if the weather isn’t great, the eating is. We went out for dinner today and had wonderful seafood gumbo, grilled fish and shrimp. Nothing like a day of sea air then fresh from the ocean dinner. Good stuff.

Overall, this is essentially a beach location. We need to plan to come here again in the summer (actually maybe spring or fall ) to get a chance to appreciate it more fully. We are here one more day. Hopefully the weather will cooperate and we’ll get out and about a little more.

Not ideal beach weather…. Low 30s at night and 50 degree days !
We have done some bird watching and there have been some great Ranger programs. In one program we saw samples of some soft coral. It looks just like insulated wire. Weird. We walked the beach this morning and saw some of that coral out there so she wasn’t making it up. I found a little bitty crab…cute but not lunch worthy. We saw porpoises too. Twice we have seen huge flocks of white pelicans very high in the sky. They seem to swarm like bees from V formations to whirling funnels and back again. Amazing to watch.

This birding thing can be all consuming. It is easy to spend an entire evening trying to identify what we see during a given day on hikes or just hanging around camp. We met some pretty serious birders at the talks and guided walks. One couple has over 550 birds on their official life list …..in the US that’s 970ish bird species, the Holy Grail for birders. We are having fun with it though without taking it quite so seriously. I do need to get to the bookstore for my new book though. This 1966 version I have actually has some obsolete names (go figure) and the regions where various species live has changed quite a bit in that time.

The Big Tree. It’s a 1000 year old Live Oak. It is 35 feet in circumference with a canopy nearly 90 feet in diameter. Amazing.
More alligators. We saw three while on a hike. All were across a little pond from us so not too scary but they were big (two of them we guess are over 8 feet – tough to estimate with no one willing to stand over close to provide any scale).
Our bird list is growing! Pelicans are huge and I never knew there were so many kinds of ducks. We haven’t even tried to identify seagulls. Tomorrow there is a talk on identifying shore birds. Definitely something I plan to go to.

We had the top down this afternoon on the drive through the nature preserve.

Those big birdies are the claim to fame for this park. This is a migration destination and they claim over 250 pair are here. Unfortunately for all the gawkers, it’s a hugh park and much of if marsh and unreachable. We got some hints on where to look and saw three of them this morning. Pretty cool to see and to realize that they are recovering from only 15 pair in the world. We seem to have gotten something right.

It’s a three day weekend and the park is full. We are in the overflow…read “parking lot”. Not so bad though. It is quiet and we get WiFi from the park office. Maybe we will get a site tomorrow?

We saw three gators today. One was huge. All we could see was his head and shoulders and that was enough to assure that I won’t be going into the water anywhere around here! Pretty impressive to see. I guess we haven’t seen alligators before, just crocodiles since it was in Florida and these guys don’t live there. Whichever, it’s all about the teeth!!!