We’ve been back on the Gulf Coast for a couple of weeks and, for the first time since we’ve been living on the road, I actually feel like I’m on vacation.
When we were here in February, I had some Mac client calls, I was focused on getting us a hosting job for April, and I was working on the new Photos For Mac e-book. This time here, I have no work commitments and my time is all mine. And I’ve been loving it!
Every weekday morning, Cody and I drive down to the beach for a good, leash-free romp along the waves. Weekends are too crazy-busy on the beach with campers and party folks with their trucks and hot rods and golf carts driving up and down the sand. During the week we have the beach to ourselves.
Cody and I walk together, at our own pace, him searching for a stick or running in the shallow water, and me, picking up litter. There are trash cans every few hundred yards, so I clean in sections. Sometimes I follow him into the water and it feels so good to get splashed by the waves. The pelicans fly overhead, and it is instant happiness for me.
I go to the beach again before sunset, sometimes alone, sometimes all three of us, and every night I delight in the pelicans gliding over the beach houses, and diving into the water for fish. One evening Marika drove the car on the beach all the way to Bolivar Flats, a very popular birding area on the west end of the Peninsula. It was windy as we drove the posted 15 mph, and we had the moon roof open. Marika had to tie up her hoody because I insisted on having the windows open so I could hear the waves.
During the days I have embraced sitting outside in my zero-gravity chair in a pocket of shade along the back fence, and reading. One cloudy day I even took my chair down to the beach to read, and that was pure joy. But without an umbrella or shade tent, there’s too much sun for me to do that most days. So in the afternoon, Cody and I sit under the shade of the palapa watching the egrets and herons in the slough while he gets a brushing.
We are in high bird migration season, which is the reason we came back to the coast for another month, and Marika goes out almost every day to a different spot to bird. She is a true bird lover. She isn’t interested in just seeing a bird to say she saw it. In fact, unless she’s had time to really study the bird, she won’t add it to her list.
She can sit and study a group of birds for an hour. Then she’ll walk a little further and study some more birds for some more hours. I don’t have that kind of an attention span. Even bringing a book or going for a walk while she’s birding doesn’t work for more than three hours. So most days she’ll go alone, or meet up with someone she’s met on one of her outings.
I joined her last Sunday for a drive out to High Island, a mecca for springtime bird migration. Thousands of birds flying up from South America come though the area. When there is a big storm, the birds are exhausted by the time they’ve crossed the Gulf of Mexico, and High Island is the first big land mass with trees and ponds and plants to eat. The birds “drop from the sky” and hundreds of bird watchers and wildlife photographers flock to the area to see the varieties and numbers of birds.
The drive to High Island runs east along the coast, past twenty miles of breaking waves and beach houses on stilts. Once you turn inland, the small town of High Island is just a few miles up the road. There are several wildlife refuge areas in town, with trails and benches for prime bird viewing. There is also has an active rookery for Egrets, Cormorants, and Roseate Spoonbills that I wanted to see.
We parked where we had parked when we came to High island in February, when the trees were bare, the ground was soggy-muddy, and there were very few birds. Since then, spring has colored everything green and the volunteers have installed new boardwalks over the boggy ground.
There were several viewing platforms along the trail, giving you a bird’s eye view of the rookery island, about thirty feet feet across a pond. Hundreds of nesting birds dotted the trees, the great egrets and snowy egrets already feeding their fuzzy-headed babies, the roseate spoonbills still gathering twigs for the nest, and the dark cormorants tucked down, sitting on their eggs.
More birds walked along the shoreline within a few feet of a sunning alligator, the spoonbills scooping their bills into the water, then shaking them to strain the water, the egrets poking their slender bills into the water like a spear.
We had a different angle at each viewing platform, so that, with my binoculars, I could really see the stunning orange on the tail feathers of the roseate spoonbill, and that the alligator was missing a few teeth. I watched baby egrets extend their opened beaks, begging for food, and a pair of spoonbills mating on top of their nest. And all around me, people with immense camera lenses were clicking, clicking, clicking, and the rapid shutter sounds reminded me of gunfire.
The next day we went out for fried catfish lunch, then stopped in Rollover Pass, a favorite spot for fishing and birding. We parked at the end of a dirt road to watch shorebirds and barges along the Intracoastal Waterway.
Marika set up her spotting scope and I took a walk along the small beach. I found a plastic five-gallon bucket to sit on, and amused myself watching several dozen avocets poke their long bills along their side feathers to clean themselves.
I carried my bucket back to join Marika, who was sitting on her portable stool, and we named everything we were seeing: pelicans, terns, cormorants, skimmers, great blue herons, willets, sanderlings, black necked stilts, and laughing gulls. On the drive home, we saw cattle egret standing next to cattle along the highway.
Tomorrow we’re taking the ferry into Galveston for a boat tour of Galveston Bay to see more birds, and dolphins, and learn more about the history of the area. Last week when we took the ferry over to go food shopping, instead of staying in the car, I stood at the bow of the boat, with the wind, and the sea spray, and the wide open view, and it was exhilarating. I can’t wait to do it again tomorrow.
And this weekend we’re going back to Bolivar Flats to bird, with the hope of running into a very famous birder who will be leading a tour there.
And in between all of this vacation fun, I’ve been planning the next chapter of our travels when we leave the coast at the beginning of May. Stay tuned!
