An (Almost) Year in Review

I started working at Anahuac NWR on November 1st, 2010.  I took a few days to get settled in.  I was given a trailer, and a work truck. We have a community building with a living room and kitchen, two baths and a room for the washer and dryer. Thati  is my trailer in front of my Honda Fit with my my Blackhawk Zephyr solo canoe on top.  I carry my bike behind the car both for better milage and because it it really hard to lift it to the top of the car.  The truck is the one I started with.  Now I have a smaller ranger with a tank in back. And the rig to the right belongs to Judy Bell, a volunteer a really enjoyed.  I have a link to her blog and her pictures are better than mine.

There were already lots of birds coming into the refuge.  And the staff was doing controlled burns.  This was a new area of open water, created by the geese which ate the tubers of the plants that were here and created a wonderful birding spot.  But mostly you need a scope to enjoy them. These are white-faced ibis and probably great egrets.

And soon after I got to the refuge, I was able to enjoy the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen in Texas. this picture was taken from the volunteer area.

Throughout the winter, I live to see and hear the geese when a hawk or harrier, or low-flying plane puts them up in huge clouds in the sky.

 

At the end of the year, the professional crabbers, mostly Viennese, have to take up all their crab traps. Then volunteers remove the abandoned ones because they kill crabs and fish needlessly. Early in February, there was a parade of crabbers hauling in their boats loaded with traps. Now I see them coming in to collect the crabs every morning, just about dawn as I bring in my first load of water.

The refuge hired a guy to build terraces in Shoveler Pond while they were waiting for a day calm enough for the airplane to spray pesticide on the Phragmites as they worked to make Shoveler Pond into a fishing hole again. It is still waiting for water because the water available is too salty.

This tree is a large part of my life.  It sits all alone in a field I drive by several times a day,  and looks like something I'd expect to see in Africa.  I think of it as a survivor since it made it through Hurricane Ike. This picture was taken in February.  It is even more stressed now.

One of my favorite jobs was guiding a videographer while he took pictures of the refuges and the birds there. I got to help him find wintering birds and geese in February and then migrating birds in late April. My job was to take him to good locations and then redirect his attention as birds flew over or landed to the left or right or where he was looking.  My friend and I even got a rail to walk across the road in front of him for a good closeup. But this day he filmed the dawn and then we stood around and froze our feet while waiting for something to put the geese up.  But we also had the rewards of an eagle, many ducks, black-necked stilts, herons, and egrets to keep him shooting while waiting for the geese.

This vermillion flycatcher spent the winter in the Skillern Tract, but on a portion that wasn't open to the public because the refuge was building a accessible trail down to the rookery overlook. Hopefully he will be back this winter. I also got to watch an immature male molt into his adult colors before he left us during spring migration.

Wildflowers started blooming in January and by the end of March, there were lots of all kinds.   I like this picture of Lanceleaf coreopsis.

And where there are flowers, soon there are butterflies. The monarchs were migrating back in early March and I got this on on a galardia. 

By April the canals around Shoveler Pond were getting so low that we could see the alligator dens. (And I used to have to use a canoe to get across the canal  to spray water hyacinths because the water was over my head.)This alligator has his tail in his den.

Our whole area supports thousands of cows. They are continually moved from one field to another. And during the winter, we had a herd of bulls in the field across from the trailers.  I had to keep my fan on to drown out the noise of their bellows.  They had a deep, carrying roar that reminded me of whale calls.  Most of the cows are mixed breed but one day there were a couple of longhorns in a pasture. This one has such a sweet expression.

I spent a lot of time at the rookery at Smith Woods in High Island Texas.  This premier birding hotspot is only a few miles from the trailer so I went there once a week or more after work between March and July.  There were thousands of roseate spoonbills, neotropical cormorants, great egrets, cattle egrets, and snowy egrets and lesser numbers of little blue herons and tri-colored herons.  This picture is off two spoonbills fighting over a stick. They rattled their bills and used them like sword fighters.  And I never tire of their breeding colors - where else can you find hot pink, red orange, and yellow looking so good together?

May 7, 2001  was the date of the grand opening of the new Refuge Headquarters with its own Visitor Center.  We had a series of booths set up for the kids, programs for the adults, and I led a series of birding tours down the path/boardwalk that runs from the center of the building to Lake Anahuac.

The headquarters is on a very special site with a completely different set of habitats than the refuge.  The land by the road is a typical East Texas mixed forest with hardwoods and pine trees. It adjoins a cypress swamp which ends on the shores of Lake Anahuac. My favorite birds there are the pileated woodpeckers and the prothonotary warblers. The swamp part of the boardwalk the the view of Lake Anahuac are among my favorite sites in the refuge

May had no rain - we didn't get any from early February to July - and the mottled ducks were flying off and leaving their babies as the places they had nested in dried up. This little guy was found in a parking lot and didn't make it. 

Mallows continued to grow and bloom in the ditches along the main road. The county mowed them down and now they are back and blooming once again.

In June, I was still trying to get all the trees planted. Here I'm planting a trio of false indigo bush, Amorpha fructosa. Steve, a fellow volunteer, helped me with the 20 gallon ones.

 

July was notable for rain.  We got 3.4" at the volunteer trailers but only about 1.5 inches where my trees are growing. However, the headquarters got 8" and both their ponds filled up for the first time.  But we have only gotten about 1/5 of normal so far this year and are praying for a tropical storm.

 In late June the first of the snow-on-the-praire started blooming. Now there are a few areas that are solid white with it.

 In July through September, I tried to spend a couple of hours, several times a week cutting baccharis and hauling it off. In places, it had overgrown our little trees and I couldn't find them to water them. And I had to water more and more trees when the cypress and willows we expected to be in shallow water ended up high and dry and dying.  I had two guys that helped me about a week and we got a lot of the areas freed up. But there is still another thousand or so hours of work to be done in cutting the baccharis and then spraying the sprouts - they re-sprout in a couple of weeks.

And from January to the present, I've hauled water to the plants.  I've hauled it in buckets with the truck, with a tank on the Kowasaki mule, with buckets and tubs in a wheelbarrow, and finally with the tank in the little Ranger attached to a garden hose or two which is by far the easiest way to water. I used up all the rainwater we had in tanks at the refuge and then had to haul each 120 gallon tank from my trailer to the refuge, a twenty mile round trip.  Now I can only haul three loads or less a day, depending on what else I have to do. It takes 40 -50 minutes to fill the tank and about 25 minutes of travel time.  Then it takes between 1.5 and 2 hours to water the trees, depending on how many times I have to pack up the hose and move the truck.

  I usually water before and after I work at the Visitor Centers, which makes for a very long day.  And I've only been able to rest for a few days at a time before starting over. Even the last little rain only moistened the top four inches of the soil.  I'm in the process of inventorying the trees and assigning them a value of 1 - 5. 1 being a supple stick with no leaves and 5 representing a tree that has noticeably grown. I have lots more trees in the 1- 3 range than in the 4-5 range. I simply cannot get enough water to them fast enough.  Here I'm watering a group of mulberries, which are among our healthiest trees. They have actually grown about a foot or more this spring and summer.

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 In August I started making bags and magnets in Zazzle, an on-line store. We think the bags are too expensive but the Nature Store is carrying my magnets.  I'm glad I was able to make some magnets of the pictures I've taken. I also made one of the refuge's pictures into a magnet. It is of the momma alligator with babies on her back. You can see them by scrolling down in the sidebar.

Late August and September was the start of harvest of both hay and rice. And after the rice was harvested, the fields were also cut for hay.  I think the bales are beautiful when they are scattered out across a field, but in a matter of hours, tractors with fork lift attachments have hauled them either to one place in a field, or loaded them on large flatbed trucks or trailers and hauled them off.

This will probably be my last post for a couple of weeks.  I have to sort my stuff into what gets given away, stored with a friend, packed for shipping or packed into my little Honda Fit.  And I still have to water the trees and work at the Visitor Centers two days.  Then I'll be spending a few days moving out of the trailer. But I'll keep you posted on my play and travel over the month of October and my trip to California in starting at the end of October.