Friday, February 1, 2013
San Antonio River, Mission Reach, Roosevelt Park Trailhead
once around the Roosevelt Park loop trail
Today's photos:
Yesterday and today I assisted the San Antonio River Authority with a Mission Reach education program for high school students. Since I was already at Roosevelt Park this afternoon, it made sense to go once around the loop one more time for my walk today.
The first photo is a red-tailed hawk.
The second, third and fourth photos are bluebonnet plants, the State Flower of Texas, that will soon be blooming.
The fifth photo is a red-eared slider turtle.
The sixth photo is an orange sulphur or one of its close cousins.
The seventh photo is one double-crested and two neotropic cormorants.
The eighth photo with the top of the Tower of the Americas in the background is of a hawk. It is soaring high above the river at a good distance upstream from where I was walking. I think this is the red-shouldered hawk that nests close to the Alamo St bridge.
The ninth photo is of four slider turtles squeezing onto a single rock as slider turtles are prone to do to soak up the warmth of the sun.
The tenth photo is a mealy blue sage in the process of blooming.
The eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth photos are of a gulf fritillary gathering nectar from a cultivated variety of scarlet sage.
The fourteenth and fifteenth photos are a huisache tree at the intersection of Lone Star Blvd and Mission Rd. This huisache is in full bloom.
The sixteenth photo is of an Anacua tree, more commonly known as a sandpaper tree because of the very rough undersurface of the leaves. The leaves of the anacua have actually been used as a fine grit sandpaper.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
The highlight of my walk along the Salado Creek Greenway on Monday (January 28, 2013) was a very large flock of black-bellied whistling ducks. In addition to the less than ideal light from the overcast sky, an additional complication involves the editing of all the photos I took of this flock.
One bird in particular provided an excellent opening in publishing this large set of photos. I think there are two qualities of this species of duck that are generally the most noteworthy: they are ducks that don't quack and they are spectacularly beautiful in flight.
While I was photographing the flock, a number of the birds took flight, but there was one in particular that stood out from all the others:
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Here are a few more birds that I photographed on my walk along Salado Creek yesterday (Monday, January 28, 2013).
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, one of the major complications I had to deal with was the fact that the overcast sky combined to produce both a dim light and a pronounced background glare. It made it difficult to see, much less photograph, especially, the smaller birds. I think this difficulty is more pronounced in this series than it was in yesterday's:
The first three and last two photos in the series are a loggerhead shrike. From the time I started the walk until I returned about an hour and a half later, this shrike was still perched in the same location on the wire.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Salado Creek Greenway, Lady Bird Johnson Park Trailhead
upstream along the Morningstar boardwalk
Today's photos:
When I returned to my car at the end of my walk this afternoon, I was thinking the photos I had taken would be relatively easy to divide into two sets and set up for publication. Later, when I began going through the photos to begin the editing, I discovered I had a wider range of material than I had remembered taking.
All of the photos from this walk are of birds. I will explain the "complications" in tomorrow's post. For now here is a bit of information about the photos in this series:
The first two images are of a red-shouldered hawk. These are actually from the same photo. The first image is a slight cropping of the original photo. It gives a good indication of how far away the hawk was flying. The second image is an extreme cropping of the first image. Even though the resolution is fairly low, it is still recognizable as a red-shouldered hawk.
The next five photos are of a great egret that flew by low overhead.
The last three photos are a pair of cedar waxwings. The dim light and glare from the overcast sky made it difficult for me to see when I was taking these photos if these were really cedar waxwings or if they were black-crested titmice, but the correct identification was obvious when I saw the photos on the computer monitor.
All together, there will be at least two and possibly three or four more posts of the photos from this walk. In many ways it turned out to be a very similar experience to the one I had at Crescent Bend Nature Park on Monday, December 14, 2012.
