Got water? Got birds!

Wow! Until an hour ago, when I looked more carefully at my folder of water bird pictures, I was not aware that I had managed to catch a pelican in flight. As you can see, the timing could have been better; his beak was definitely not holding more than his belly can. Yes, we're back in Louisiana for this post, and while some of the same birds might be found at our local lakes in the right season, there are several I've never seen before! BTW, praise be for the 12x zoom on the Canon; otherwise, you wouldn't be seeing most of these pictures.

The laughing gull, it turns out, is an easy bird to photograph. He's quite aware that food is to be had where there are humans. Pieces of bread. Popcorn. Potato chips. All the good stuff that your mother warned you about.

We saw a lifetime worth of gulls while waiting for a ferry to carry Sson's vehicle across a waterway. With cars accumulating, food was being tossed left and right to a large crowd of wheeling and dealing birds.

Snowy egrets (above) and cattle egrets (below) were plentiful in and around the bayous.

At one site, Sson and I frightened a large flock of cattle egrets .

Not sure, but this looks like a great egret landing.

The zoom was stretched beyond its limit to capture this stilt and his reflection. Not a single one of the stilts came any closer than what my LH used to call bird distance -- a careful spacing that keeps all birds the same small size for the observing birder. A very frustrating critter to try to photograph.

Now this is a lovely bird that does not appear in any of my books of Western birds -- a little blue heron. Yes, we have great blue herons at every pond or watering hole that is an acre or so in expanse, but the pretty bird above was a new experience.

As was the white ibis crowd we found in a dead tree on one bayou excursion. Again --I've seen many black colored ibis locally during fly-through season, but never one of these spectacular critters.


One very lucky day, Sson and I spotted a flock of roseate spoonbills in a crawdad pond. The birds were stirring up the water to feed by moving their amazing beaks back and forth. Just take a look below; no question where the name originated.

This guy must be a juvenile heron of some sort. But ... no idea of which sort. Yes, that is him below, too.

Linkage: Warren at TouchWind has found an amazing bit of totally misguided desert landscaping down in Tucson ... Rich is offering an interesting group of surreal Prescott prints for sale at a new site.

Pedestrian-free zone

Let's get this straight. You live over in the Cliff Rose subdivision on, maybe, one of the Monopoly streets like Short Line Lane or, maybe, on a non-Monopoly street such as Raindagger Drive. Your doctor has told you to get more exercise. The newspaper has just published a feature about the trails in Watson Woods, which is directly across SR89 from Cliff Rose. Aha. Time for a hike. You walk down to the point where Rosser Street meets SR 89.

Northeast corner. Oops.

Southeast corner. Oops.

Northwest corner. Oops.

Southwest corner. Oops. It's very simple -- you can't get there from here, unless you fire up your gasmobile. It's a genuine pedestrian-free zone, brought to my attention by Derek the Mapmaker and founder of the new religion for the 21st Century, Must Be Funny. I guess that he thought that this arrangement was pretty funny. Now he's got me wondering about the funny potential of city hikers trying to cross a road anywhere near one of those roundabouts which traffic engineers consider the real bees' knees. This year. Thanks, Derek, for the data and the pix.

Cliff Rose Note: Perhaps the developer belonged to Must Be Funny; perhaps he was serious. Whoever (or whatever) he was, he preceded our time in Prescott. When we arrived, the map was already platted with the following streets directly from the Monopoly board: Short Line Lane, Reading Lane, Baltic Avenue, States Street, Ventor Circle, St. James Place, Mediterranean Court, Oriental Avenue and Atlantic Avenue. And, of course, Marvin Gardens and Boardwalk. Nowhere have I seen history or discussion of how this curious set of street names was selected. Nor have I scoped the development to see if Baltic and Mediterannean really comprise the low rent district, with the toniest mansions situated on Boardwalk.

Eyes on Ragin'Bot

Cajun has to do with crawfish and etoufee and bayous and stuff like that. But robotic vehicles? Yes, indeed. Let me explain. One night while I was down in Louisiana, the SSon drove us to his office on the campus of Louisiana State University at Lafayette. The idea was for me to see his excellent pix of amphibian eyes. There are two of them above.

But while we were in the building, he took me to see RaginBot, the robotic car that is the successor to the CajunBot; both have been contestants in DARPA's highly publicized challenge to create fully autonomous robotic vehicles. So -- though this university was originally an ag school, it is currently competing quite well against the Big Boys such as Stanford and Carnegie Mellon.

Here's the mechanical works (above) and some of the sensor arrays (below). If you'd like tech talk about Ragin'Bot, here's a video for you. There's also a blog.

The sponsors are thanked above; the logo for the enterprise is below. It is fitting that after all three of the DARPA challenges, the Cajun crew and their backers have produced a Cajun cook-out for one and all. Everything bought locally in California, site of the challenges, except for the crawfish, brought in just for the occasion. (Yes, as described in the blog, sounds like it must have been etoufee.)

Pine caldelabra

Looking out my kitchen window toward the east, I've been struck how the new growth at the tops of nearby pine trees resembles giant candelabra. The tree above was the first to catch my attention; it is a landscape tree, likely a Scotch pine. The close-up below shows the first year, female pine cones near the top of the new stalks, while the male "cones" are those brown clusters located lower down on the branch, presumably to enable cross pollination.


Once I got involved in peering more closely at the current growth patterns, I discovered that there was yet another non-native, landscape tree visible while I drank my morning coffee. This fellow's candelabra are dark green; the close-in view suggests a bigger cluster at the base of new growth that includes both male and female cones.

The native Ponderosas in my neighborhood are big specimens which did not begin sending out their new growth as early as the aliens. However, I took these pictures about a week later, when the process was underway. The picture above shows both new, green first-year cones and mature brown second-year cones, which will be dropping one of these days. Yes, it takes not one, but two years for pines to create their seeds (pine nuts), which are found in between the scales of a cone.

Apparently there's no proper common term for the pollen producing male parts; the scientific name, of course, is a thorough-going mouthful: microsporangiate strobili. Did you get that? Did you try to pronounce it? During the spring pollen season in Prescott, everything is covered in a fine yellow dust, including the lungs of folk, many of whom are quite sensitive. You'll note that our local pines feature much longer needles and don't look nearly as tidy as the trees favored by the landscapers.

While I thought that our local pines might not develop the elaborate new growth shown by the aliens, I was obviously wrong -- here's a good example of a tree taking full advantage of the comparatively wet winter we enjoyed this year. New little Ponderosas will be sprouting after the monsoon rains set in; when my dotter lived up near Flag, she spent hours pulling up the little seedlings that came up all over her lawn.

Today, I caught sight of this pine at the Willow Creek Walgreen's. I couldn't figure out if it was one or the other of the trees I see from my window, or a different, third variety. But it's pretty against the sky so I included it here.

Amanda's medical critters

Today was the day for my annual check-up and so off to the MD's I went. One thing I like about going to various professional offices is to discover what kind of art work is on the walls. My doc is a family doc, which means a certain number of patients are kids.

Enter Amanda. She's the young technician who handles preliminaries, such as blood pressure, and follow-ups, such as EKGs.

She also makes the kids' examination room a much more comfortable place, especially for the younger children.

She calls her free hand wall paintings Amanda's Magical Murals. If you'd like walls painted for your kids or grandchildren, she can be reached at amandadrotar-at-cableone.net.

Tennessee tumbledowns

I aim to please. I really do. However, Avus has requested pictures of classic backwoods Tennessee shacks. The kind that Lem and Alvin might inhabit. But Tennessee is a long, narrow, stretched out state that starts in the Smokey Mountains, then flattens out, is criss-crossed by mighty rivers and ends at the Mississippi. My time was spent in the flatter, Western portion of the state; my mental picture of Clem, Lemuel or Alvin, beards and all, places them in the hollows of the eastern mountains.

On that wonderful wild country ride with The Other Niece From Memphis. we did find classic unpainted, tumbledown buildings, such as the barn above. This example was quite unexpected, as it was located on a fairly prosperous-looking horse raising spread; if you look closely, you'll see horses under the roof.

We passed these abandoned trailers as we headed down a less traveled highway; turned out they probably belonged with the automotive jetsam across the road (below). Again, the operation looked to be supporting a comfortably life-style for the owners. The surprise was finding a junker business out in the middle of nowhere.

Another possibility. Not. Though unpainted, this barn appeared to be in operating condition. Also, note that it has power.

But as we closed in on our goal, the freshwater pearl museum, we passed through a very curious enclave of truly abandoned houses and outbuildings. I'd guess that this house was the central building of the cluster, Big Daddy's home as it were.

Something more like the shanty that Avus has in mind. It was one of several stretching along the road.

Further back on the property...

...then these tired, worn-out structures were next.

This more modern, house appeared to belong to the abandoned group of buildings. Note that its roof is not corrugated iron -- and has withstood the ravages of wind, rain and more wind.

Next to the "modern" home in the pictures above was this classic backwoods Southern house...

...and this building, thoroughly overgrown. What a strange story must lie in behind such abandonment -- perhaps an estate became tangled in the intricacies of probate, with all heirs dead or settled in California by the time matters were finally settled.

As for Jeb or Abner, the backwoods boys, here's where they'd probably be living these days -- in a second or third hand single-wide mobile. Not nearly as colorful, but a lot more comfy!

Linkages: Thanks to Terrell, my post about Swamp Things made it into the monthly Learning in the Great Outdoors round-up, which lists several interesting places to explore. BTW, I didn't mention in the previous post that I finally had a reason to try out the sports setting on my camera, which made photographing the Apache Crown Dancers much easier. I was inspired by Amie's sequence of her dog leaping into the lake; very cool.