Texas & Louisiana

Malkolm's photo of a White-winged Dove.

We cycled across Texas and Louisiana in the winter (highlights below). We'll return in the spring, and we'll be busy!

Second trip across Louisiana (April 10 to April 18)

Activites TBA

Second trip through Texas (April 19 to June 21)

High Island Area — April 20-April 30: experiencing the spring migration on the upper Texas coast
Aransas National Wildlife Refuge — May 6: presentations with students and adult groups are in the planning stages
Corpus Christi — May 9th: Texas State Aquarium, interactive video conference that will reach thousands of students in Texas.
Lower Rio Grande Valley — May 14th-28th: activities at the World Birding Centers in this birding hotspot with students and others. Details TBA.

Wendy's Highlights of our first swing through Texas and Louisiana!

We entered TX at Kermit on Nov 30, and left from Orange on Dec 29. We moved forward on 21 of these days, for 15 of which the winds were “not helpful. The winds varied from gentle cooling breezes to vicious headwinds to cross winds that knocked me right off the road. For two glorious days we enjoyed tailwinds – whoo-hoo!
West Texas was not a welcoming place. Every bit of land is privately owned and fenced with barbed wire. At first we rode through miles and miles of desert scrub liberally dotted with oil drilling rigs. One day we counted 6 oil rigs per individual bird! Later we passed ranches which are set up for hunting deer and exotic African species. Once, we camped in an open gravel area behind a barbed wire fence.

In the morning I walked back towards camp after visiting the bushes. I could see a Border Patrol officer talking to Ken and Malkolm: “Y’all have the permission of the property owner to camp here?”

“No”, said Ken. “We didn’t see a No Trespassing sign. We thought it was BLM land” (In the US, that’s public land – like Crown land in Canada).

“Ain’t no BLM land in Texas,” he drawled. “Y’all’re luck the landowner wasn’t the won who found you. He might have shot first and asked questions after.”

Our first really pleasant experience in Texas was visiting Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. We were warmly welcomed by Tonya and the other staff. We ambled along the grassy trails with tangles of bush overhead. We climbed the observation tower, and saw three whooping cranes, almost 1% of the world’s population of wild whooping cranes. We made plans to visit again in May.

We joined a well-organized, well-attended Christmas Bird Count at Mad Island, near Matagorda. Twenty-three birders were in our section, and there were nine other sections! We met on Friday night for a potluck supper, and were assigned our areas. At noon Saturday after a preliminary tally we were re-assigned to cover the “problem” areas. It was run like a military operation, and it worked. I believe the Matagorda count (236 species) was the highest in North America.

Just before Christmas, we wobbled over the bridge on to Galveston Island. I am serious about the wobbling. Ken had 5 broken spokes. Jim Stevenson had invited us to stay at his house. Jim is a busy man: naturalist, guide, author of numerous natural history books, and force behind the Galveston Ornithological Society. He is a great guy with a wicked sense of humor. One of his birding “adventures” was shooting a feral cat that was stalking an endangered Piping Plover – and having to endure a long court battle (he was acquitted). Galveston Island is mostly covered with new, monster homes, “master planned communities” which have been built over wetlands. Ironically, many of the communities are named for the bird habitat they replaced: Heron’s Roost, Egret’s Rest, etc. Jim’s house is a breath of fresh air. It is built on a tiny hill that is thick with trees. Rising above his house, and the trees, is a sky deck. Looking out of his windows, all you see are trees – and Roseate Spoonbills flying past in the morning. Jim went to visit his mom and left us to enjoy the kitchen, the washer/dryer and the deck.

The gulf coast of TX is flat-flat-flat. However, there is an Intracoastal Waterway that runs a short distance inland, and big boats need to pass under the bridges. Every once in awhile, you see what looks like a ski jump rising up to the heavens in front of you. It is a bridge. The bridges can be narrow and scary.

It was exciting in TX and LA to see wintering birds that we know in their summer range: Killdeer, American Robins, Yellow-Rumped Warblers, Tree Swallows, Savannah Sparrows, Red-Winged Blackbirds.

We left TX hoping, illogically, that the winds would be different when we crossed the state line into Louisiana.

They weren’t.

We struggled to get to New Orleans on time for our presentation there. The wind was not our only barrier. The road conditions were the worst we’ve yet encountered. For example, we were riding down route 90 south of Lafayette. The highway was 2 lanes each way, concrete. It dropped off 4 inches to the “shoulder”. The shoulder showed signs of once having been chip sealed. Now it was potholed (potholes filled with soft sand) and piled with heaps of soft gravel. Between these were clumps of grass and sprinklings of glass. This might have been a great black diamond Olympic mountain biking course, but it was unsuitable for us. We wove down this mess for a mile or two and Ken yelled “This is impossible!” After three phone calls to state highway police we found a side highway that was safer to ride on.

Malkolm celebrated his 16th birthday by riding into a head wind. Because of a flat tire in the late afternoon, we pulled into a campground in the freezing dark (literally – that night it dipped into the 20’s), and his birthday supper was boxed macaroni and cheese.
In New Orleans we found a bike path. I felt welcomed on the road for the first since Albuquerque. We walked our bikes around the refurbished casino area and the French Quarter. We rode down other streets where the pavement gouged away in washouts, heaped up in other places.

We met with the Society for Conservation Biologists in New Orleans and had a good evening with them in a building that had 7 feet of water for weeks after Hurricane Katrina. We stayed with Scott and Stephanie. On their street, half the houses are still boarded up. Government disaster relief cheques are only now being issued.

A swing bridge was broken on our only feasible route east out of New Orleans, so we had to detour around Lake Pontchartrain, a small detour of 100 miles. We saw Red-cockaded Woodpeckers on the north shore. We slept one night out on a marsh. It was surprisingly noisy, with frogs and rails making a racket all night long.

We couldn’t leave Louisiana without one last detour. This one was to find a safe bridge over the Pearl River. We had to head north to Bogalusa to find it. We pulled into Bogalusa late in the afternoon, and met another kind stranger. This was Charlie d’Aquin, who let us stay in his yard, and fed us plate after plate of elegantly presented local foods.

The next day, Charlie escorted us into Mississippi. As I crossed the Pearl River, I hoped, illogically, for better winds.