A few weeks ago we headed down the Texas coast to see the endangered whooping cranes which winter only at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. In the mid-1980s when we first went to see the cranes, there were only some 90 birds alive in the wild. Today there are nearly 400.

These are great birds. They stand 5 feet tall and have a wingspan of over 7 feet. They are the tallest birds in North America and fly with both their neck and legs extended. The whooping crane in flight is an absolutely magnificent sight.
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The best way to see the cranes is to take a tour boat that goes up the Intracoastal Waterway and slips into the backwaters of the refuge's wetlands. The cranes feed on blue crabs and wade along water's edge grazing for them.

If you are lucky the boat will be able to get close to where the cranes are wading. If you are lucky. This year we were not so lucky. There were plenty of cranes to see, but, alas, they were always "over there," and over there was always a couple hundred yards away. As a result my photos are less than wonderful. Even with my longest lens the cranes did not fill the frame. But there are only some 400 of these elegant birds in the whole world, so I suppose any photo is special.

In the photos below the first two photos show a juvenile which has a rusty coloring on its head and tail. When born in the Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada last summer, the chicks were almost totally cinnamon or rusty in color. While two eggs are usual, typically only one chick survives. You can see the common family unit in the first photo in the gallery. By the time they arrive back in Canada in late spring the juveniles will have separated from their parents.

Originally I was going to open this post with a list. But it was long and boring and I would have lost you before I started. It was a list of schools. A list from Reuters that cataloged "some of the worst (italics mine) U.S. school shootings in the last 20 years." It was a literal roll call of 23 schools with shooting deaths. Twenty-three. More than one school per year. 

​This past week we had our latest mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. It happened on Valentine's Day and Ash Wednesday. It is the second "major shooting" – according to CNN there have already been 8 school shootings total – in 2018. The first was on January 23 at Marshall County High School where two students were killed and 14 others were injured. Marshall seems to have already faded in our memory.

Valentine's Day and Shootings
Once upon a time almost 90 years ago, seven members of the Chicago underworld were killed en masse by a rival gang. It was Prohibition and it was a turf war. We know it as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. 

Here we are, eighty-nine years later, with a new St. Valentine's Day Massacre. This time there are 17 dead. But in this massacre those killed were not gang members who knew the dangers of their world. No. Fourteen of the victims were children. Innocents. The other three were their teachers. And the killer was not some underworld tough guy. He was a 19 year old who was pissed at the world. I don't know why he was pissed. What I do know is that he had an AR-15 style assault rifle. At 19 years old he had an assault rifle with lots of ammunition. On Valentine's Day. At a school.

Are We Crazy?
What else I know is that the responses to this tragedy from our leadership in Washington focused on mental health and included no mention of guns or gun control. We have apparently passed a milestone, and it is no longer reasonable or even necessary to question our population's ready access to weaponry. It has become an absolute.

Perhaps our leaders are right. Perhaps it is a mental health issue. For what nation in its right mind would tolerate a status quo where its number of guns exceeds its population? That's right. According to GunPolicy.org the U.S. proudly leads the world with 101 guns for every 100 residents. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) puts our first-in-the-world figure at a more modest 88 guns for every 100 residents. But what does it matter? Either way it is sick.

Pizza and Lotteries
​I don't want to bore you with statistics, so instead of guns just imagine a Domino's 8-slice pizza. The U.S. took 4 slices for itself and left 4 slices for the rest of the world. Way more than its share.

For gun-related deaths, let's use a lottery ticket. An American is three times as likely to have his or her ticket selected as anyone else. And each of us has 51 times the chance of being the ticket-holder as someone from the United Kingdom! And I suspect the lottery analogy is really not far from reality. Life does seem to be closer to a lottery than ever before.

Who Can Believe It?
Is it any wonder we have such a high rate of killings by gun? Does it surprise anyone that there is an absolute positive correlation between the number of guns in a country and the number of deaths in that country caused by guns? It shouldn't. We lead in guns owned and we lead in firearm-caused deaths. I know we like to lead the world, but this is not a category where we want to be first, or even in the top ten.

What is the answer? The popular answer these days seems to be to buy more guns; arm everyone. Stop those bad guys before they stop us. Stop them with your gun. There are even calls to arm our school teachers! The narrative goes this way, "This killing or that one would not have happened if you had a gun and stopped that guy." 

Mental health problems? Yes, I would say so. 

​We headed to Galveston Island in early December to see the Sandhill Cranes which winter there. Our little weekend outing almost didn't happen. We had a cold snap and a dusting of snow – our first in 9 years – just a day or two before leaving. On top of the cold spell, the RV decided to have a leaking leveling jack and went off to the shop. So our plans to park the RV by the bay at the state park changed to a reservation at the local Best Western. No matter, we had a wonderful, relaxing few days.

We still managed to visit the state park and enjoy some time walking on the beach. The picture above was taken during one of our walks. What is fun about the photo is that you are looking east – not west – and seeing the sunset reflecting on the Gulf and the horizon. Linda saw this (I was facing west to catch the sun going down) and said that if I took the picture people wouldn't believe the colors. She was stunned by the beautiful colors of the Gulf which is usually a muddy green. Well, here is the picture – believe it or not.

All of these photos were taken at a great distance with the longest lens I own. None of the photos are what I would like them to be. Linda would tell you that it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools, but I can't agree. I am sure the problem is my lens, and the images would improve immensely with the lens I know that I absolutely need. ​

Other Birds
We were there for the cranes, but we saw lots of other birds as well. There were wading birds – egrets, herons, and ibises – and shorebirds – oystercatchers and black skimmers – and waterbirds – cormorants and both brown and white pelicans along with a number of different waterfowl. 

Pelicans, Oystercatchers and Skimmers
American Oystercatchers and Black Skimmers are very social birds and tend to live in large flocks or colonies. The oystercatchers feed in sand or mud flats looking for oysters, clams or mussels. They use a long, heavy bill to open the shell.
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The skimmer has an especially interesting method of feeding. The lower part of its red and black bill is longer than the upper bill. When feeding the skimmer flies very low over the water with its lower bill slicing the surface. When the bird senses that it has touched a fish, the upper bill snaps down instantly to catch it. Often you can see a dozen or more feeding skimmers flying in a straight line along the water's edge, all with their bills cutting through the water.

Egrets and Herons
No matter where there is water you can find the egrets and herons. The two most familiar are the white Great Egret and the mostly gray Great Blue Heron. These two tall, slender birds can be seen wading in wetlands or along shorelines looking for small fish, shrimp, crabs, and amphibians such as frogs. Both birds spear their prey.

Once the holidays are over and our RV is safely back from the repair shop, I am hoping we can travel down the coast to see the Whooping Cranes. These guys are very rare – less than 400 living – and winter each year on the Texas coast. Seeing them will be a privilege.

Linda and I packed up Bam-Bam, our trusty old motorhome, and headed north to Missouri to see the Twins for the first time since last October. 

Things sure have changed. The babies have turned into action guys, running this way and that, climbing stairs, and showing unbridled curiosity.

The picture shows the boys at a fall festival at the Missouri Botannical Garden. At the pumpkin patch, Jack picked up one pumpkin after another until he finally tried one that was almost his weight that pulled him to the ground. Tom enjoyed the display of alpacas and llama, watching them with delight for several minutes (a very long time for a 17 month old).

We had a fine trip up and back. We stopped at several state parks and yet another Route 66 museum along the way and thoroughly enjoyed the journey, generally traveling no more than 200 miles on any given day. Outside of a quick trip to our local state park for a checkout - this trip was cut short by Hurricane Harvey - we haven't used our RV since last Thanksgiving. 2017 has not been a great year for us. We treated Bam-Bam to six new tires and three new batteries and asked it take us on our way. And it did so with no problems.

Oyster Creek is now down approximately 23 feet by my crude measurement. But it is still not within its banks. I estimate it has two to three feet more to drop before it is back to its normal level.

The photos below show the exact same view from the bridge. The top one was taken this morning,  and the blue line across the photo shows the water level at the creek's maximum level. Essentially, anything brown was under water. For comparison, the lower photo was taken 8 days ago when the creek had already dropped 9 to 12 inches.

"Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is Here"
State Farm is ready to take care of business. They have put up this temporary building - which they call a Catastrophe Center - on one corner of the parking lot at our local Lowes. We grabbed this photo with the iPhone yesterday. I wonder how many other temporary facilities they have sprinkled about the Houston area.

And Now It Is Irma
Not but a few weeks after Harvey - a Category 5 hurricane - which hit the Texas coast and then turned into a 1,000 year rainstorm, the Caribbean Islands and Florida have been hit by a second Cat 5 storm, a huge thing that has wreaked havoc throughout that state. Our good thoughts go out to the people of both Florida and the islands.

Two storms. Two huge storms. One FEMA.  We all remember these immortal words from another storm, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." We can only hope.

All I can say is that it is a good thing there is no global warming or climate change. There isn't, is there? Right?

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
The Brazos River crested Friday night and today we see Oyster Creek is finally beginning to recede. The creek looks to be down some 6 to 9 inches. The flooding at the west end of our street is also subsiding and the flooding two blocks east of us has disappeared. 

Oyster Creek Photos
Below are three photos of what the creek looks like this morning - Sunday, September 3. You may think you are looking up a lazy river, but no. You are looking at a little creek that is about 10 feet above its banks.

This first photo shows today's level compared to what it was Saturday morning - see the yellow lines. The next two give you a look both ways from the bridge. Finally there is a picture of what Oyster creek looked like last Saturday. This photo was taken by Linda during a sunny break in the rain. The creek is already over its banks by a foot or two. The boy and dog in the picture would be underwater today.

Remember, you can click on a photo to make it larger.

Harvey - The Social Media Storm
That's what they are calling Harvey - the Social Media Storm. Today's newspaper is filled with wonderful human interest stories of people helping each other. A major theme in most of them is what a huge part social media has played in the coordination of rescue efforts.

Almost every story I have read involves some touch with social media. Facebook, Twitter, Nextdoor, and something called Zello have all been major assets to getting rescuers where they need to be. There is the guy who Facebooked that he was four days without his needed dialysis. His boss saw his post and sent a buddy with a boat. Then there is the nursing home where the wheelchair residents were up to their waists in water and were saved by a Twitter photo posted by the owner's son-in-law. He lives in Florida! A Houston food blogger was stranded in San Diego, but she used her social media contacts to link restaurants with hungry evacuees and rescuers. Who knows how many stories like this there are.

Linda and I don't Facebook or Twitter or Nextdoor. I always thought of them as basically empty and banal, but maybe the time has come. Maybe old folks like us should have these things for a safety net. I don't know. We'll see. 

​I am not aware of any homes in Quail Valley being flooded. There has been some street flooding in our sub-division, and it takes a bit of a circuitous route to drive out. Where there is no street flooding the streets are close to completely dry with few puddles along the gutters.

How lucky I was when I selected this house some 36 years ago. I came down from Philadelphia with no thoughts of the flat coastal plain or the possibility of flooding. I just picked a house with a nice floor plan in nice neighborhood. Somehow I picked right. Over three decades and six major storms and, with the exception of some minor roof damage from Hurricane Ike, we have come through unscathed. 


The Storm Experience 
What’s it like being in this kind of a storm? Well, it seems to me it is either incredibly stressful or it is incredibly boring. 

For those who experience the flooding and have to leave their homes the stresses and concerns are almost unimaginable. 

For those of us who are fortunate enough to be able to stay dry, a storm like this is just tedium. You can go nowhere. You are house-bound. You read a book. You read some more. You look at the un-ending storm reports on the television until you start seeing the same rescue scenes for the third and fourth times. Then you go to Netflix - thank goodness for Netflix!

When it is time for a meal you look in the refrigerator and realize that you really could have bought a bit more when you were last at the store. So maybe just hotdogs and beans. Oops. There are two of you and only one hotdog. Well, something else then.

Breakfast finds you with canned peaches for fruit because the bananas are gone (you never want to buy too many bananas because they just go bad). Will the yogurt last until you can get back to the store?

Tedium.


Houston - A City Under Siege
This header seems a bit melodramatic, doesn't it? Perhaps, but I think it is apt. 

In the Middle Ages a town would be under siege when an attacker would encounter a city that refuses to surrender. The city would just hunker down and try to wait out the attacker. That is Houston - under attack, under siege - waiting out Harvey.

The Houston area - the nation’s fourth largest metro - was under a constant barrage of rain for five days from what has been called a 1000 Year Storm. Harvey dropped an unprecedented amount of water, some 45 inches (up to 50 inches in spots), on the area and caused flooding just about everywhere. Houston’s annual rainfall is 49.75 inches, so there was a year’s worth of rain in five days.

Folks who never experienced flooding before found themselves flooded. Homes that had previously experienced a few inches of flood water this time had several feet of water - perhaps as much as 10 feet. Pictures of people sitting on their roofs were not uncommon. 

The call went out for boats to help rescue people stranded at their homes. The boats came from everywhere. Being a coastal area, there are boats in many driveways, and it seemed they all responded. There were boats at every place that had high water. Along with all the local boats, the Cajun Navy - boater volunteers from Louisiana - came in force to help.

Boats came from all different places. Police, sheriff, Parks and Wildlife. If an agency had boats, they were sent to Houston. Yesterday I saw a convoy of four Border Patrol boats coming down Route 6.

Rescue is a bit different these days - a bit more compassionate. With many past storms it was difficult to rescue people who were trapped by flood waters as they did not want to leave their pets. Now when people are rescued Spot and Tabby come along. It makes life easier for all.
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Evacuate? Who? Where To?
The news commentators and pundits have put on their 20-20 hindsight glasses and are asking, “Why didn’t Houston evacuate? What were they thinking?" I will try to explain this the way the Harris County Judge (chief commissioner) explained it. 

With a hurricane there are known situations - wind, storm surge, etc. - which are predictable. The trouble zip code areas can be evacuated in an orderly manner. This storm was rain, just rain. Rain is not very predictable - particularly rain coming through in bands from a swirling storm. You just don't know where the greatest precipitation will be. In fact with this storm, some of the areas with the greatest rainfall amounts were as much as 100 miles apart. 

So who evacuates? Everyone? If everyone, then where are 6-1/2 million people going to go? And how are you going to get them there? Evacuation is not a simple option.

My thinking is that the mayor and the county judge made the right decision.

Final Thoughts
I heard someone on the television today say something to the effect, "Disaster often builds community." You can already see that happening here. Not only all the boats. There is also the man who saw a hand-made sign for volunteers and was still helping 18 hours later. There is the website that already has had over 5,000 people sign up to volunteer to help with recovery. The circus performers who came to the convention center to entertain the evacuees there. Mattress Mac, our hometown huckster, who opened up his two mega-sized furniture stores to some 800 evacuees. And so many untold small kindnesses that will go unreported. Somehow I suspect Harvey will ultimately make Houston and its sense of community stronger than ever. 

The sun is back and it is glorious.

It's been a long time since my last post, so it is good that I can give you something a little special - hummingbirds, those wonderful little creatures that flit around your garden so quickly you often don't see them.

These photos were taken Saturday afternoon when Hurricane Harvey was giving us a brief respite from his rain. The rain stopped around midday and the birds all saw their chance to grab some food. The finches, cardinals and jays were at the seed feeder and the hummers were at their nectar station. The backyard was very busy for an hour or two. It was delightful.

This is migration time and we will see these ruby-throated hummingbirds August through October as they make their way to Central America for winter. We'll see them again in the spring on their way back north. Once it is winter we will be seeing the black-chinned hummers.

Enjoy the little gallery of photos below - the first photos I have ever taken of hummingbirds. I have a lot to learn, but these photos turned out okay. Just click on any thumbnail to see the full-sized photos.

What's Harvey Doing Now?
Harvey is raining! The good news is that Harvey is now a tropical storm, not a hurricane. The bad news is that Harvey is going to hang around. Rather than dumping a whole lot of rain on us and then moving on, Harvey is going to dump a whole lot of rain on us and then do it all over again - for several days.

After raining at what the news told us was a 2 to 3 inch per hour rate from late afternoon through to about 2:00 a.m., Harvey calmed down to a light rain shower for a while - but did not stop completely - only to pick up again this morning. Right now it is about 9:30 Sunday morning and the rains have been at yesterday's intensity since about 8:00 a.m. We expect rain like this throughout most of today and the on through Wednesday.

​Well, as Linda says, "The flood insurance has been paid."

A Word About Linda and Me
The first half of 2017 essentially didn't exist for us. In mid-March when I was a month out of surgery (see the post A Holiday Odyssey) Linda went in for her own turn under the knife. What was to be a day surgery was complicated by by a blood clot and she ended up with a vein graft and a week in the hospital. Nerve damage that occurred as a result of the graft has delayed and prolonged her recovery, and she expects to be in physical and occupational therapy for another month or two. So, in effect, we have spent the last eight months having medical procedures and recovering from them.

But we are on the rebound. In the past two weeks we have been able to take our toys out for the first time since Thanksgiving. Last week we had the boat out on the lake for a delightful afternoon and this week we took the RV to the state park - a little cobweb-clearing outing that was cut short by our friend Harvey. 

Not being able to get out much this past winter and spring caused me to shift some of my photography thinking - there is, after all, only so much Price is Right, Jeopardy, and Wheel of Fortune one can watch. To put it simply, if I can't go out to take some photos, then I have to find a way to find interesting subject matter inside. Hence, thinking small.

By getting up "close and personal" with very small things, it is possible to bring the camera inside. And it gives a whole new perspective to how these things are seen.

Look at the photo of the needle from Linda's sewing basket, or more accurately the eye of the needle. You can see that even the strands of the thread are really made up of many threads and the needle is no where near as smooth as you probably have thought a needle is. For this picture, the needle was magnified about eight times in the camera. In other words, what you see in the photo is exactly what I saw in the camera's viewfinder.

Below is a photo of the other end of the needle. You probably thought a needle was, well . . . needle sharp. But looking at it from a slightly different perspective - through a different lens, as it were - it seems that the tip is sort of rounded. Just don't try to tell that to your finger after you pricked it.

How Is This Done?
You actually have to think big to take pictures of small things. The technique is known as macro photography. It typically requires some special lenses or unique lens combinations to magnify tiny subjects. And magnifying the subject also means that any camera movement is also magnified, so it is important that everything be kept as still as possible. And adjustments for focus can be almost microscopic. In other words, you just can't pick up the camera and do this. You might say, the smaller the subject, the bigger the obstacles. 

The photo below shows the setup I put together for my macros. The camera and the subject stage are mounted on a common base to keep them from moving. Both the camera and the subject are mounted on rails and can be adjusted forward-backward and left-right using fine screw adjustments. The subject stage can also be adjusted vertically. Currently three LED lamps are used for lighting the subject.

​If you look right in front of the lens in the photo below, you can see the needle from the pictures above. It is stuck in a ball of clay which holds it in position on the small laboratory jack that is used for up-down adjustments. Also, notice how close the lights are to the needle.

In macro photography you not only magnify the subject, but you also magnify your problems. In particular, when the very front of the subject is in focus, the rest of the subject will be out of focus. That is because the depth-of-field of a macro photo is razor thin. To combat this, multiple photos are taken with the focus slightly different in each one. Then all of these photos are combined together into what is called a "stack" to create one sharp, in focus image. The needle photos above are stacks of about 35 - 40 photos each. 

This is all a lot of fun, so you can expect to see more photos of small things in the future.