Category: Kathy’s blog
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Scissor-tailed Flycatchers
photos by Chuck Lorenz With feathers a palette of muted salmon beneath pearly grays and whites, and its tail a pair of delicate, elongated scissors, no wonder people call it “the Texas bird of paradise”. And now this lovely bird, after its winter sojourn in Mexico or Central America, is returning to breed in Texas…
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Sea Whip Soft Coral
“You know, those are actually animals!” a stranger told me as I tsk-tsked at what appeared to be Crayola-yellow shoestrings, rope, plastic or fishing line strewn along the sands of Boca Chica Beach one afternoon in early spring. My error was a common one. Well-intended volunteers regularly dispose of tangled clumps of this creature—sea whip…
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The European Starling: A Survivor
“I Will Survive” could easily be the anthem of this wise and most resourceful European immigrant. This glittery, short-tailed, long-beaked bird is not supposed to be here—but it is, and has been for over a hundred years, through no fault of its own. Our own resident populations—joined by thousands of their northerly fellows, plus great-tailed…
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Moon Jellyfish
With damp, flowery patterns agleam in the sunshine, hundreds of translucent moon jellyfish decorated the sands at Isla Blanca Park one late September afternoon, delighting, but slightly discomfiting my grandchildren, fretful they might be stung. So, rather than swim, my granddaughter and I played “baby crocodiles” in the shallowest of pools formed by the low…
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The Plain Chachalaca
photo by Charles Lorenz Many a chatty person in the Rio Grande Valley answers to the pet name “Chachalaca”—and it’s really no wonder. The birds’ cries of Cha-cha-lac, cha-cha-lac!— a rocking, overlapping call-and-response—resound from trees and shrubs, especially in spring and summertime mornings and evenings. Intermixed with the industrial whine of summer cicadas, nearby humans…
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Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes in the RGV
An S-shaped figure—with a triangle head, stripy rattle and Y-shaped tongue—illustrates this helpful warning in English and Spanish: “Caution: Watch for Snakes In Brush and Along Trail” at Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park. I gaze ahead and tread carefully. Yet I, like many, have yearned to see a rattlesnake—at a safe distance. But,…