A little family time

I don't get enough family time so it's always a treat to get to spend time with them. Saturday morning early, chauffered by my son Lee, I departed to San Marcos to visit my daughter. She and her husband had recently had a new house built, and have just moved into it. It's a very impressive home on 33 wooded acres. I can't wait to see it once the yard gets landscaped. It's quite a mess yet, but she has bird feeders and bath out, which is a good start. Here's video of her trying to keep cattle away from her temporary water feature. They keep it drained. A contractor will be installing a fence in a couple of weeks. Then she'll be able to do some permanent stuff.

Cattle quickly drain the temporary water feature

Meanwhile, here we are looking at her birds in the late afternoon. It took several weeks before birds starting showing up to her feeders and water. Once landscaped, it'll keep getting better.

While there, I got to visit briefly with Lee's oldest daughter. She's graduating from Texas State Univerity next month with a degree in computer science. Already she's working for Motorola, and making an obscene salary.

Photo by Lee

Sapsucker saga

I arrived at the oasis shortly after daylight, rushed to the trail cam to see if anything interesting was around. To my surprise, yesterday, around 4 PM, the camera captured a gorgeous, very vocal, male Williamson's Sapsucker. It had shown up at the drip, drank for about 3 minutes, left, and returned 10 minutes later, and drank for another 3 minutes. I ended up with 15 repetitious-looking 15 second video clips. Above is one from the first visit, and below is one from the second visit.

So I rushed from my cabin/computer to the oasis to see if it was still around. As I watched, I also watered trees. Around 11:30 AM Tira Overstreet and Corey Rich showed up. I told them about the sapsucker, and how slow birding was. I bemoaned that the sapsucker was gone. Then I went back to my quarters to eat a quick brunch. I hadn't even eaten before Tira came rushing up to tell me they saw the bird and photographed it. I tore down there. Not even 5 minutes had elapsed, but I never did see a sign of it. I was just glad they saw it and got to document it. Here is Corey's photo of it. It's not a rare bird. I've had them at the oasis before, but it's a difficult species to get to see. They're so erratic and unpredictable!

Beebrush was in bloom, not only perfuming the air with a wonderful scent, but also attracting lots of butterflies. They let me get closer and hold still better than birds. 😀

Monarch

Common Buckeye

Snow geese!

The oasis got a flyover of [41] Snow Geese, which happened unexpectedly and quickly. Had me scrambling to document. It counts as a new oasis species, even though they only flew over.

I heard one of them call and looked up to see them. Had my camera on me, but couldn't get it to focus. It never focuses on dots in the sky.  Finally, after they were way far away one of my blind shots captured the above heavily-cropped photo. Better than nothing. I've learned that not zooming the camera in situations like that is better. That's probably what I did to end up with this one.

Other than that, birding has been rather boring, both in town, and at the oasis. The day I saw the geese (Nov 7), I also saw my last Lucifer of the year, I presume. It was a juvenile male that I hadn't seen before, so I think it was just migrating through. My breeding Lucifers have all gone.

I'm told that Monarchs migrated way farther east of here this year, so maybe we won't get any exciting winter birds this year. Perhaps they only winter here if they're desperate, and with lots of rain everywhere, there are better places to go. Don't know.

In town I got a couple of unusual butterfly species. Besides the Long-tailed Skipper that I saw on Oct 27 at the Plumbago (see previous post), I had a Dorantes Longtail also on the Plumbago (and Turk's Caps) on Nov 6.

I have lots of Turk's Cap, but only one Plumbago, so, naturally, that has inspired me to protect the Plumbago from a possible freeze tonight. Also going to plant a bunch more of it in the spring. Can't ever get too much of a good thing!