27-28 January 2013 - My Auspicious Day

Today is a great day. It's my birthday. My family has never gone crazy about birthdays, so in many ways it is just another day. Except that the first email I saw was from my brother. He wrote:

"I see you have a Full Moon to mark the occasion, and 100 percent chance of snow!"  

That made me feel great. As an avid moon watcher I had missed the fact the full moon was on my birthday. Makes me wonder how many times in my little life that has happened?  I had seen the moon the previous night and it looked darned round to me, but I hadn't put it together, the full and the date. And yes, we had snow. All day. Very pretty snow, I might add. 

The first interesting thing about the day? We had a mixed flock of birds come through. There must have been 100 or more birds: robins, cedar waxwings and a few starlings.  The cedar waxwings are gorgeous. Love their spiky heads. They were twittering all over the yard, trying to find the few remaining berries on the russian olives, pyracantha and fruit trees. 

I grabbed a needle and thread and started stringing dried cranberries. The people across the street from us had a gorgeous Christmas tree: straight limbs, very open and lacy. When they put it out for the trash pick-up I rescued it and planted it in a big snowbank outside the living room window. Made a great spot to hang the cranberries. 

Adding to the delight of seeing the cedar waxwings, we identified two new birds. Quite a birthday present. First, after a lot of discussion and pulling out of bird books, we discovered a new tiny little bird hanging around the suet feeder is a brown creeper. It is so tiny and fast that I have not been able to get a really good picture. 

The second new-to-us bird turned out to be a yellow-rumped warbler. 

This is another very small bird, but isn't he a cutie?  He is also a very fast moving variety, but I caught him landing. 


28 January

My brother came over today with a birthday cheesecake. He is a really good cook--it was delicious. This was a fabulous surprise and such a treat. I'm thinking another piece would go down really well right now. 
 

 

  

 

21 Jan 2013 - Punta Cana Warm

Thanks to a company incentive trip, Jack and I left a three week cold snap for the much warmer climes of the Dominican Republic. We had been in a pattern of cold ranging from -3 to 1 degrees at night with highs clear up to 12.  Five days in the 80s was a welcome respite. 

What comes next is way too many pictures. But, be grateful, it is just a tiny sample of the several hundred shots we took. 

We stayed at the Hard Rock Resort in Punta Cana on the far east edge of the island. The resort itself was huge: twelve swimming pools, 10 restaurants, a Jack Nicklaus designed golf course, the requisite casino, night club, spa and high end shopping. Jack had a wonderful day on the golf course. We skipped the shopping, spending most of our time prowling the resort and the beach. Several man-made rivers bisected the resort which we watched closely for wildlife. 

We flew in over the Bahamas. The color of the water was amazing. It was almost like looking down on an aurora borealis.  

 I mentioned there were twelve swimming pools--but there was just as much surface water you were not allowed to wade, swim or walk in-- all for show. 

 

 

 

 The infinity pools were lovely and hung over the man-made streams. You could rest on the edge of the pool and watch turtles, moorhens and herons. 

 

 

The other pools closer to the beach were full of people.

 There were also pools with islands for events, not for swimming. My guess is a lot of weddings happen in these structures, in addition to those held on the beach. 

 

 

The beach had sand that was so white and fine it felt like silk. 

  

 A little beach art. Coconut and drift wood. 

 The patterns in the sand were intriguing. Here is a crab's hole, but there are so many kinds of tracks around it. Makes you wonder if the crab eating birds look for the hole or the pattern.

 

 If you wait long enough and sit very still, you can find the residents. 

 I was also fascinated by the shapes of the clouds. 

 

But the best part was the bird watching, although I was really disappointed with the paucity of birds.  Here are my two favorite bird photos from this trip. 

This lovely specimen is a Tricolored Heron

I'm pretty sure this is a green heron. I loved how it looked like it was babysitting the turtles. We saw many, many turtles. Most of them were painted turtles like these two.

  The moorhens were in two stages: parents feeding babies as well as some pairs building nests.  

Moorhens are really interesting--they swim like ducks but have feet like chickens. The babies must be born with full-sized feet-- check out the toes on this little chick! The river is filled with some kind aquatic plant that the mom is feeding to one of the chicks.

The adults have yellow legs with a red spot above the elbow. At first, I thought the red was banding, but it is just natural coloration.

 

 I spent quite a bit of time watching some nest building. Here is a female trailing a piece of weed that is about six feet long. She pulled this upstream at least 50 feet. There was quite a bit of this same stuff around her nest. Makes you wonder why the pieces further away any better than those readily available.  

Her nest is butted up to a pillar holding up the bridge. Here she is pulling the strand up into the nest. 

It took her about 10 minutes to pull the entire strand up and poke it in the nest to her satisfaction before she left in search of another piece. 

This moorhen had a great nest built in a stack of bent cattails. She was almost invisible except that I was looking and had a long lens that works like having binoculars.

The egrets seemed to enjoy posing. Guess they are used to all the touristas with cameras. This tourista took way too many pictures, but better that than not enough. 

 

There is just something so regal about these birds. 

I need to do some research into what these birds are, but I'm pretty sure it is a coot. Whether it is an American Coot or a Caribbean Coot is still a mystery. 

The birds in the next three pictures have me stumped. According to what I can find in Sibley's they could be Sanderlings, Sandpipers or Stints in non-breeding plumage. Help! I can tell you that they run so fast I had a really hard time getting pictures. By the time I got the birds in focus they were long gone when I hit the shutter button. I got many blurry pictures.

  

 Best guess here?  Some variety of plover.

 Then there are these ducks that are not in Sibley. I need to enlarge the geographical range of bird identification books that I have. 

I didn't see any weaver birds, but I found quite a few of their nests. Works of art!

 

In the evenings we heard bull frogs, but the only ones we saw were smished on the walkways. We did see one lizard, probably more of an anole.

 The biggest surprise of the trip was razor wire on top of the walls around the resort.

 But in some places the vines were ameliorating the effect of the wire. I loved it. Grow vines, grow!