Fine Feathered Friends – April 14th

You might have heard that I was recently in Texas. They’ve got a lot of interesting flora and fauna there.

Just a few minutes after the total solar eclipse in Kerrville, while it was still dark and twilight like and I was trying to recover from the emotional high of the eclipse, I went wandering Louise Hays Park, which is located on an island in the Guadalupe River.

Landing in this tree overhanging the river, sort of like a large, flapping, B-52 trying to do a carrier landing, was this dinosaur. A heron or stork of some sort was my guess.

A dinosaur with filigree feathers sticking up out of its head. We don’t see that in SoCal!

It was still dark-ish in part from the partial eclipse going on, but more so from the heavy, thick low cloud cover layer. I was also trying to not fall into the river.

What’s this? As they turned, there’s a big patch of color on it’s head!

And a white stripe on the cheek! That should make getting an ID easier.

Yep, the Cornell Lab Merlin app easily identifies this as a “Yellow-Crowned Night Heron.”

That’s a new one for my birder life list! Obviously!

I’m not saying that I would take a week or so off and go off to the Texas hill country to go looking for birds. But the next trip? If I’m going there (or anywhere else) for five or six days, maybe the trip could be expanded to seven or eight days so I could go wandering with a camera out in the wetlands and boonies, looking for new and interesting critters and birds.

Maybe.