Today's photos:
It is hard for me to believe it has been more than two months since I have walked the San Antonio River trail. With today as absolutely beautiful as it was, it seemed like the perfect time to revisit the mission reach of the river and see how the restoration project was progressing. So, today's walk took me from the Mission Rd Trailhead to Concepcíon Park and back.
I ended up spending over three hours along the river. It will take me a good part of the weekend just to do a basic edit of all the photos I took. I went through the set fairly quickly this evening and selected a random 22 photos that I feel give some indication of my experience. I am running out of superlatives to describe it all. Needless to say there will be several more posts from today's photos.
It was nice to see that the landscaping that had just been planted and was still being planted in June as part of the restoration process has taken hold and begun to mature. There were numerous butterflies, dragonflies and damselflies. The wind was blowing at about 15 mph with gusts to around 25 mph, so photographing the numerous flowers was a bit more of a challenge.
While the egrets, cormorants and mallards are year round residents, the range of bird species was different than the birds that are present in June. There will be more detail about that in the upcoming posts from this walk.
Beyond those few observations, the photos speak for themselves.
The Olive-sided Flycatcher can apparently be confused with a few other types of flycatchers, but based on everything I can find out about them, I'm reasonably certain my identification is correct on this one. Assuming I am correct with the identification, this bird is here in the Leon Creek watershed on a stopover in its migration from its summer home in the far north to its winter home in Central or South America. They cover a whole lot of miles in a year.
This is probably as good a time as any to point out that many of the birds seen in Bexar County are migratory (TPWD pdf link) and are only here for part of the year. So, the birds you might see at one time of year in a given location may only be passing through or living here for a portion of the year and won't be seen at the location year around.
In addition to looking like an olive-sided flycatcher, this one was also behaving like an olive-sided flycatcher is supposed to: perching at the top of a very tall snag (a.k.a. dead tree), swooping down to catch its prey and returning immediately to the same perch. Notice that in the fifth photo down, it is still holding its last catch in its beak.
Today's photos:
It rained yesterday on the eastern and western edges of Bexar County. I wasn't sure from the radar how much fell on the upper Leon Creek watershed, but apparently not enough to create much, if any water flow in the creek. I actually began my walk this morning going the short distance north back to the pool where I ended Monday's photos. I was surprised and disappointed to find considerably less water in the pool than there had been on Monday.
From the pool of water, I walked south to about a half mile or so south of Bandera Rd. The Leon Creek Greenway is apparently open all the way south to Ingram Rd now, but the trailheads are far and few between in this new section. The next trailhead south of Bandera Rd is at Grissom Rd.
The photos are posted in the order they were taken. When a walk begins with photos of a white-tailed deer family, it is likely going to be a very good walk. I think the photos, once again, speak for themselves.
For whatever it's worth, according to my blogger stats, this is my 100th post. That's a lot of walking and a lot of photos. I look forward to the next 100 posts. For all who have given me feedback along the way, thank you.
