Category: Kathy’s blog

Photos by Sandra Mink Ah, a relaxing day of fishing! Buy some shrimp, bait your hook, cast, then sit on the jetties and wait—that is, if you are human.   If you’re a green heron—a stocky, crow-sized wading bird common to our wetlands—you may well fish with bait, too, dropping a twig, feather, bread crust,…

photo by Charles Lorenz Flexible, adaptable and unpredictable—that’s the American white ibis.  Primarily a Gulf Coast inhabitant of salt and freshwater mudflats, the white ibis also forages in pastures, lawns and flooded fields. It may breed as far northwest as Dallas, its variable nesting season and sites apparently dependent upon rainfall. White ibises occasionally pop…

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…

“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…

“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…

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…