Sunday morning, we joined some geocaching friends at the Houston Arboretum for a little hike and social opportunity. I thought maybe we would see some birds and take some pictures, but we did little of those things. I saw a hawk which I actually think was a Broad-winged Hawk in retrospect. There was a little cluster of birds in a tree that I suspected were Cedar waxwings, because they had the little crown going, but their breasts were a golden color from underneath. I had a little discussion with amberita13 about whether or not that was an accurate ID, because she thought they would be gone by now. I did see some birding reports over the past week of people who were still seeing them, and fendmar seemed to agree that the atypical weather patterns this year might have kept them around longer than usual.
There were actually a lot of cool little spots along the trails to spend some quiet time observing nature, like the slick backed turtles sunning themselves on logs on the pond, or the multitude of butterflies that floated around us as we walked. 
We walked for about an hour and a half. We kind of had the place to ourselves, because technically the Arboretum was reserved for a private event, but they allowed us to come in from nine to eleven. We found a few caches as a group. It was fun how we all went together at first, but then there was a debate on whether to pursue a high terrain cache or a low one, so our group split. We went to the high terrain one. After this, we happened to find our group again at the next cache, even though the groups went different directions on the trail. Lucky for them, because they were stuck not finding the cache, but then our group made the save. We all took some group photos and everyone was just really enjoying each other, the weather, and the location. I want to say we walked along all except the orange outer loop on this map. The Discovery Room and other facets inside the building look like they will be very appealing to the children, on a day when the arboretum is truly open. Maybe next weekend? There was also a patch of wildflowers near Memorial Park that I want to get pictures of the kids in. I picked up a schedule of events, and posted many of them over to the left here in the side column. I want to go back and spend more time there with the kids. It was truly an awesome place where wilderness meets civilization. 
Category: Geocaching
All The Things We Didn’t Do
It was one of those moments that is so typical of us, and yet so frustrating. He was on his tiptoes, and I was leaning over from a picnic bench, trying to make sure I didn’t fall down. We were peering into the windows of an empty cabin. A curtain fluttered from the breeze of the fan, a breeze that could have come from our sighs. These were sighs of regret over the choices not taken.
This should have been our weekend. This should have been our spot. 
We imagined the kind of fun we would have had, walking out from the cabin in an early morning to see if we would get a bite on a line from the stocked lake. Pictured the kind of peace we would have had, chilling on the porch. Thought about all the dollars we would have saved, if we had just done the things we wanted to do.
We made our reservations for Buescher State Park back in December. I should have called it in, but I was confused about the difference between the cabins and premium screened shelters, and how each one is reserved in the system. We had known since two years ago, when we came up here to hike one day, that we wanted to come back and reserve Cabin #3, but instead I had reserved us a premium screened shelter, which looks like this below:
This weekend, the weekend of the Texas Challenge in Bastrop, we came up to the park, claimed our campsite, got our keys, and then never came back, until this minute, the minute of regret, as we were leaving town two days later. We had coughed up our $62 (after coupons) that we ended up spending on the reservation as a “donation” to the state parks. We had also managed to spend another $225 we didn’t intend to on two nights at a hotel.
Why, you ask? Because, this is what we do. Most of the time, we are really great for each other, but sometimes we do these things; I overplan, he procrastinates, we forget to communicate, we let timelines slide, we go with the flow so much that we end up missing out on things we meant to do. We ended up doing so many things this weekend that we never did the things we meant to do, like set up our campsite, relax in nature, look at the birds, drop a line in the lake, take a hike on the trail. We would have loved to take a bike ride from Fishermans to Ferry Park in downtown Bastrop. All weekend we drove back and forth in front of The Roadhouse cafe near Bastrop State Park, and never once did we sit down in there and have some hot sandwiches, fried pickles, and iced tea. I would have liked to get some pictures of those gorgeous wildflowers blooming all along HIghway 71, maybe stick the kids in there and be like a real Texan.
What we did instead is spend an ungodly amount of hours sitting at MayFair Park in Bastrop, in between going to geocaching event after geocaching event. Four events in twenty four hours. We spent hours planning, scheming and texting our team. We talked to lots of friends and teammates, exchanged travel bugs, spent too much money at Buccees, too much time at La Hacienda. We (or rather he) gave a water-bottle bath in the parking lot to one dirty little boy, who spent most of an afternoon rolling around in a dirtpile. We drove around to seven different locations to grab codes off doors to log the Lab Caches specifically put out for this event. We bought some more rocks for son and I’s rock collection, spent too much money again buying pecan treats and gifts at the Berdoll Pecan Company, checked out some bronze statues at a foundry, took a tour of a facility that bottles rain water and turns it into drinking water (and then tasted it – quite good!). We spit off a bridge and got a certificate for being an official SOB (member of the Society of Bridge Spitters). He taught the boys how to play shuffleboard. We bought a couple more bottles of mead and one bottle of a sweet table wine being offered as a sample at Cripple Creek wines.
Through all of this, we were just too tired each night to set up camp in the dark. If we had the cabin, it would have been all right – we could have just thrown our sleeping bags over the bunk bed style cots that are already set up in there.
We had no idea what the screened shelter we had rented even looked like until Sunday afternoon, when we stopped by to return the keys to it. The rangers had already called us, wondering what the heck ever happened. We peeked inside it, then inside the cabins. It turns out the floor was so neat and spotless that we probably could have just thrown the sleeping bags down on it and been all right, saved ourselves a few hundred bucks. It would only have taken us mere minutes to set up, yet we were too busy to ever even stop to look.
It reminded me of other times, like when we arrived midday at the campsite we had rented for the night before and never claimed in the Redwood Forest, only to discover it was the best campsite ever, and really not that much farther down the road than the place we ended up sleeping at. So much for all my planning and dreaming.
For now, all we can do is sigh, shrug, and commit ourselves to coming back another day; another day to do all the things we didn’t do.
I am going to make it April, before those wildflowers have all hidden their heads for the summer. This time, I am calling the reservation line, and nailing down that Cabin #3. I hope you are reading a completely different blog entry this time next month.
Paul D. Rushing Park
This morning, we contemplated the choices for adventure for the day, and chose to take the new bikes out to a local park to do some geocaching and look for more birds. Originally I thought to try to get back out to WG Jones and finish the Presidential Series before it is all archived (one last back piece to go), but there was a threat of rain and J didn’t relish the thought of the long drive out there.
Paul Rushing Park is only about 20-30 minutes away, and has had significant improvements since the last time I was there (back in like 2008 – a whole lifetime ago). This park boasts 232 acres, with cricket fields and softball fields. There is also a dog park, with sections for large and small dogs. The most exciting improvement has been a hike-and-bike path that goes around a little chain of lakes, encompassing 100 acres of the park. This path has multiple overlooks with bird blinds and benches to while away time looking at the multitude of ducks that flock to this park.
Early last summer, chefkimmo and TXSunflower hid about fifty caches in and around the park, and we decided we would find some of these today. J and I have been riding our new bikes around the neighborhood at night, but this is the first time we have taken the youngest out on a group biking adventure since he started riding without training wheels last year.
My son really wasn’t too crazy about riding in the grass, preferring to stay on the path and getting a little bit nervous about us not being on it. J let him find a cache on his own with the GPS and that seemed to keep him interested for a while. Although he was a good helper with geocaching, he lost interest after a while and started to ask to go home. Plus, we were getting hungry. Therefore, we ended up just finding the caches on the eastern-most side of the park, saving the rest for another day.
We were out there for about two or three hours, and saw several interesting birds. There were also many more birds I failed to identify, in the interest of time. Some of the caches were really hard to find, and required me to participate equally in the search.
Likewise, some of the birds were really hard to identify. I think I am getting better but I have a long way to go before I could call myself a birder. After some research, I determined that the ducks that I saw out on the water today included American Coots and a few Gadwall, Wigeon, and possibly a Blue Winged Teal pair. The birding checklist for the park suggests Pied Billed Grebes should have been more abundant than the coots, so maybe I was also seeing those, although I didn’t specifically notice them, so I am not counting that species. I am going to have to go back. I did see some white geese, which from the list I would have to say were the Great White-Fronted Geese. The most exciting bird find was in the smaller pond by the back left corner – a Long-Billed Dowitcher. We also saw a group of nutria back there, most likely a mom and her babies.
As we made our way through the chain of lakes, past the softball fields and dog park, down the road again, and back to the first parking area near the cricket fields to find the caches in that first section before heading out, I saw a flock of birds feeding in the field that included Brewer’s Blackbirds and Brown-headed Cowbirds. I think I saw one Red Winged Blackbird in that group, too, which was a little odd.
We also flushed a lot of sparrows out of the grass as we rode, most likely Savannah and Field Sparrows (already counted for this year), and most likely meadowlarks as well, although I didn’t specifically see them. Those are commonly reported for this time of year there.
On the way home, we stopped at the Katy Rock Shop, which was a really nice little shop, and a fun place for the little one and I to find some treasures for our collection. Our rock collection drives J nuts, but it is something the little one is interested in. His dad lives near a place where there is a lot of natural rocks that are great for collecting, and we came home with many of these during our visits up there and have them in a little decorative basket. Today, he helped me chose a purple agate from Brazil for my collection, and he chose a pyrite cube from Spain, as well as polished stones of golddust, amethyst, and opalite. Then we went out for burgers and shakes at our favorite “greasy spoon”, Sam’s Deli Diner.
On the way home, we spied what initially appeared to be vultures up on some bare branches, but something seemed different and J turned around for us to get a better look. Sure enough, they were different…not actually vultures at all but a pair of Crested CaraCaras.
This reminded me of a story from last week, when I was in South Florida. There was this professor I was really interested in talking to, and my friend thought she was doing me a favor by pointing out to him that I was also interested in birds. I knew from his conversation earlier that he was an ACTUAL birder, and not a novice like me, so I had not wanted to bring up this point of confluence, because I felt I would just embarrass myself. He asked me if I had seen the CaraCara earlier that day on the drive in, and he was so excited about it. It was a huge deal, and I had learned that week that it was also a huge deal to this guy from Missouri. I didn’t know how to say, without seeming like a braggart, that oh, we see those all the time around where I live! Not really ALL the time, but they are pretty common birds and I really just did not understand why these guys were freaking out about them until later, when I looked at their range in the bird book. Here, and there – that is pretty much it! See the map:
We also stopped at a light long enough for me to observe that the doves in the trees were not the white-winged and mourning doves that are so common in our neighborhood, but were in fact the eurasian collared doves. That brings our identified species up to 73 for the year, about 11% of Texas’s reported 638 total species. Long way to go, but it has been winter and we haven’t necessarily gone out of our way to find birds. Plus, we aren’t that good at it yet. The good news is that spring migration is coming, and so we should be seeing more birds very soon.
Paul Rushing Park is located at 9114 Katy Hockley Rd, Katy, TX
Brazos Bend, Again
Sunday afternoon was drizzly and a bit cold, but here we were, in the truck headed south to Brazos Bend State Park anyway. We were on a mission to retrieve J’s lost binoculars lens cover, and he agreed to indulge my desire to get a few caches and look for a few birds.
We settled on the Old and New Horseshoe Lake part, because that was a trail in which we could accomplish both missions. Last time we were here, we were not near the water, so I wanted to see what the water birds were doing.
Old Horseshoe Lake is pretty much dried up right now, but there was a lot of action going on at New, as well as the larger Elm Lake to the left of the trail. We meant to be moving right along, but got distracted by a hawk flying over and then parking himself on a branch across New Horseshoe. We watched as a gator trailed an American Coot across the water. It seemed like the gator was serious, but at one point he slowed down, and the coot stopped and moved back towards him, like, “whatcha doing now?” It makes me wonder if the gators eat the coots or not, although it seems like it would be a good food source for them. There were a LOT of coots in this lake.
There were also White Ibises feeding across the lake, as well as an egret here and there. Common Moorhen also cruised the water. Our new find of the day was a pair of Blue-winged Teals who moved in and around the coots, feeding at the edge of the lake. We watched the hawk for a while, identified as a Red-shouldered, and then moved off to get those caches.
The caches were great – ammo cans just a bit off the trail, not too hard to get to or find but enough of a challenge to keep us interested. The rangers or volunteers of some sort were driving around the trail on a golf cart, stopping now and then to pick things up, and it was the only thing that interfered with the song and sound of birds. I could hear them, but I couldn’t always see them. If I am going to take this bird thing serious, I really need to learn their songs and calls to be able to identify what is out there on hearing alone.
Our best bird find along the walk was finding a pair of Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers. That was fun. Later, we saw a red-bellied woodpecker. We also saw and probably heard cardinals and the yellow rumped warbler. We saw another hawk, or maybe the same hawk, calling and then perching on a dead tree out on the field to the right as we made our way back. It was a red-shouldered as well, so might have been the same one.
As we passed the New Horseshoe Lake one last time, we found another bird in the lake that got us in a heated discussion trying to identify. It was a goofy looking bird – big and tall, with mostly grey-ish feathers with black markings and a white head. His feathers on his chest stuck out on all kinds of directions, and he looked like an old retired bird, long past the point of caring about what he looked like. After much discussion, combing the bird book, and looking at pictures online, we finally decided he was a Great Blue Heron, although his blue was now a bit faded.
I think we have 87 active caches left in this park that we haven’t found yet, so I am sure we will be back to find them, and more birds, soon.
Species total for year: 44
