A Tale of Two Chemists: “God Bless Taxes”

Blog Sun 9th - Mon 10th April 2023

“God Bless Taxes”

We were driving along the highway when Gloria remarked: I just saw a flag that said “God Bless taxes”. That seems like a strange sentiment for a place like Texas. Oh, yeah, Texas …”. We both thought was hilarious how the transposition of two letters from mis-reading the flag lead to such a wild thought. The night before we were sitting at the campground table when we were again laughing our heads off like a couple of primary school children. During our birding exploits we have been making good use of a fantastic birding App called Merlin that is provided free by the Cornell Ornithology Lab. It’s really helpful in many ways, including identifying birds from their song. It will also play birdsongs … but this has a tendency to happen when the phone is in your pocket. This reminded me of an old rhyme from when I was a young kid that goes: “Aunty Mary had a canary up the leg of her draws. When she farted, out it darted, like racing horse”. Needless to say, despite being in our sixties, we found ourselves in stitches thinking about this. A friend of ours at Brown University once commented: “You guys are weird”. He probably wasn’t wrong!

We spent the afternoon of Easter Sunday and the following Monday at Brazos Bend State Park about 50 miles southwest of Houston, Texas. This is an absolutely amazing place. There are three types of ecosystem: coastal prairie, riparian hardwoods and wetlands. The park has some of the best wetland birding we have experienced anywhere, surpassing even the Everglades in terms of the number and concentration of wading birds. We used our bikes to travel around the various trails through different habitats, occasionally parking them and walking, sometimes just pushing them along as we looked for birds. We have often equated birding to being like an Easter Egg hunt and this seemed most appropriate for this weekend.

As well as lots of wild areas to explore with a great system of trails, we were also impressed that the park has some of the most beautiful picnic areas for day-use. On Sunday there were hordes of people who came out to celebrate the holiday and it was such a lovely atmosphere. One complete stranger asked us if we would like to join his party for some watermelon!

Lake Faust Pointe was interesting but a little bit of a struggle with all the flooding and bugs. Brazos Bend was pure relaxation with a beautiful park and warm, dry and partly sunny weather.

Mike

p.s. This is the first blog post that we have written and posted at 70 miles an hour! Gloria is driving and we are on route to Big Bend NP and don't expect to have cell service the next several days

The following bird photos were mostly shot with a very big telephoto lens (500 mm, F4) and in some cases in conjunction with a 1.7 multiplier. With such great equipment you would think it would be easy to get good shots, but it really isn't. I have a ton of respect for professional nature photographers.