In this town there lived an outlaw by the name of Texas Red

I don't know what it is about Texas but, I think I mentioned on the first pass through here in December that for days I couldn't get the song El Paso out of my head after driving through that city. Today, for some unexplained reason, while photographing this TEXAS REDdish Egret I remembered there was an outlaw with that name in another song by Marty Robbins, Big Iron. Don't ask me why watching a foraging Reddish Egret would stir such memories, it just happened and I decided that is what I would name this blog entry. It must have something to do with the hazelnut creamer I use in my coffee . . .

Have You Seen The Whistling Ducks?

That was a question I got yesterday from my neighbors here at the RV park. I heard them this morning but certainly couldn't find them but they were certainly here this afternoon. There are 30+ in this picture and there were probably about 75 on the ground when I took it. At the slightest provocation many of them will fly off for 3 or 4 minutes then begin to return; in total there were about 200 when the entire group was there.

I suspect that the reason they hang around here is because on on the permanent residents feeds them. With that many ducks he must go through a lot of food. Cracked corn (known 'round these parts as '"deer corn") is cheap by the 50 pound bag and I am told that some ducks like the stuff. This image is of one on "final approach" as it rejoined the rest of the group.

And to end this somewhat rambling entry, a snapshot of a species I never located while at Quintana Beach last week: Gull-billed Tern. I had heard that this species does not eat fish like other terns but has a diet of insects, marine invertebrates, and other small animals. What I wasn't really prepared for was the fact the the foraging technique is very similar to other terns in that they fly around at an altitude of between 50 and 75 feet then go into a dive (not unlike there cousins), pulling up just in time to prevent a rather brutal impact with the ground. In this case the tern came up with (what appears to be) a Fiddler Crab. Awesome.