Birds...

I'm on the water a lot so if I am not taking a photo of a fish I caught or my wife I turn the camera to the birds of the shore. With the onslaught of fall in East Texas and the brutal 50 degree temps I long for summer on the water. Of course we will fish and take bird photos all through the winter months with great success buton't get as many pictures of my wife in a bathing suit. 

This is maybe the best bird photo I have made lately. We were surf fishing and as me and brother in law Matt sat in lawn chairs hoping for a good bite on the long rods we were approached by the member of the heron family you see in the lower right of the photo, a red egret. We tossed a few bait shrimps to him and that made him really like us. Every now and then the gulls would beat him to a bite and when he got mad he could make his hair (feathers) stand up on his head. I never got a good photo of that behavior but a little internet research describes this species feeding behaviors as "bold, rapacious and graceful." 

This bird actually returned in the evening to see if he could get a few more bites from us. Peter Dunn, 

a famous natural history writer has referred to the Red Egret as " t rex of the flats." 

Roseate Spoon Bills on the bay. This photo is a bit grainy due to the zoom distance. They were a couple of hundred yards away. The spoon bill wades and swings the head side to side sifting the mud to catch the tinier critters that the big wading birds miss. Life lesson learned, there is a place for everybody. 

We switch to fresh water for this blue heron photo. How many blue herons are there on lake Sam Rayburn?How many times have I taken this particular bird's photo because I usually take a shot of any one I see. They say that the first time Indigenous American peoples saw a camera and the photo that resulted they surmised that it was a way for the white man to steal your soul. Whether that is true or not I don't know. It's a mystery, just like any other belief and you just have to have a strong faith. If it's true I have stolen a lot of heron souls. 

Ok and to clean up these old thoughts in my old head to day we will post a photo of buzzards on a sand bar with a token wading bird that my dad always called "some kind of crane." Those buzzards are members of the Sam Rayburn Chapter of the East Texas Hygiene Committee. There's a place for them, eating the dead stuff and we might have contributed to that because for three days we cleaned fish and dumped he guts in the deep waters off this point. It's possible some drifted up but like the soul of an Indian, they are not there anymore.