Early Summer Wildlife: Baytown Nature Center, May 11th 2016

Now that the Spring school semester has finally concluded, I have a lot more time to spend at my favorite place: the Baytown Nature Center! It was a beautiful clear evening, humid but with a strong breeze in most places. The first animal to greet us on this visit was, quite surprisingly, a raccoon! She had been standing at the water's edge, and quickly approached the nearby trash can.

We had pulled over in front of the trash can after she had gone inside, and she wouldn't come out while we were there, just staring at us like this. After a few minutes, we went on our way so we wouldn't disturb her too much. This is one of the few times I've seen a raccoon out in broad daylight around here.

Just down the road, we saw a fight breaking out in a flock of Black Vultures standing around the road. The two or three that had been fighting flew away, but the rest of the flock (15 in total) stayed at the roadside, barely moving aside as our car pulled up.

Note the Red-Winged Black Bird on the other side of the roof!

My brother Travis discovered that several of them were eating something in the nearby ditch. He went out to find that it was - interestingly enough - another raccoon! This one not doing so well as the one in the trash can.

Red-Winged Blackbirds were, as usual, out in abundance, the males advertising themselves with prominent perches and mechanical songs.

A slightly more rare sighting was a White Pelican, sitting pretty on the shore overlooking Burnet Bay.

They're very big birds, a startling sight when I don't normally see them sitting here like this. They're somewhat common here in the Winter, but as Summer marches forth most of them migrate further north.

Yellow-Crowned Night Heron

This tropical plant, with it's absurdly bright pink flowers, always entertains me somehow. I just found out now it's called a Powder Puff Tree, one of the Calliandra species. Examining one of the flowers, I noticed something really interesting: there were several small blue-gray inch worms on it.

Closer examination led me to see that they were on several other flowers as well, clearly enjoying this plant. I have to wonder what butterfly or moth they turn out to be! I'll have to try and find out sometime.

Travis picked one up to get a closer look.

Herons were, as usual for the summer, very numerous. We saw eight different species today, all the usual residents: tri-colors, black and yellow crowns, great egrets and blues, snowys and cattles. You can spot this Little Blue Heron out on the rocks, overlooking turbulent Scott Bay.

There were a lot of Great Egrets out today.

Another species that was extremely numerous was the White Ibis: I saw over a hundred individuals during our hour-long visit. There's some sort of roosting area or rookery nearby, resulting in many, many ibis visiting the nature center and flying out to Scott Bay. They'll often fly right over your head, which is fantastic.

One of the many White Ibis flocks heading over to Scott Bay.

A few White Ibis foraging in the marshes.

Travis insisted that I take a picture of this giant block of foam. Sadly, there's always plenty of trash washed up on almost every shoreline here. All sorts of detritus, big and small. Kooky inventors like my brother love to trawl the wreckage for odd treasures.

On the drive in, I had seen this Forster's Tern hovering above one of the bay inlets. On the drive back out, he was still there, so I stopped for pictures.

Terns hunt by diving headfirst into the water, and this one seemed to have found a great spot with wind that allowed him to essentially hover in place. After only a minute, he dived and caught a small fish right in front of us! There were many terns here today, as we're getting into tern season: they hang out here in the summer. I saw Forster's mostly, but also a small flock of Gull-Billed Terns (four or five species are seen here with some frequency).

Sunset over Crystal Bay

To my surprise, the White Pelican from an hour ago was still there when we were driving out.

He was watching the sunset, I guess.

And just on the other side of the road: one of the many Yellow-Crowned Night Herons, with a full and beautiful breeding season crest.

(eBird checklist for today's visit is available to view.)

Nesting water birds at Sheldon Lake

A canoe trip through Sheldon Lake got us some close-up views of nesting water birds, such as this Little Blue Heron:

And these White Ibis:

There are hundreds of birds raising their young on little islands in this lake, and quite a variety of species: Cattle Egrets, Little Blue Herons, Yellow-crowned Night Herons, Black-crowned Night Herons, Tricolored Herons, White Ibis, White-faced Ibis, Roseate Spoonbills, Anhinga - these are all the species I was able to spot nesting in the trees. And they're all clustered together, little groups of White Ibis among little groups of Little Blues, the occasional night heron or White-faced Ibis here and there. Little Blues, White Ibis, and Cattle Egrets were most common. The herons had young at all stages of growth, from tiny fluffy nestlings to adult-sized juveniles, but the ibis children were all still small enough to stay hidden beneath their parents, and many of the ibis were still in the process of building their nests.

My photographer for this trip was my brother Travis. I was steering the boat and identifying the birds, so it was a team effort. Two sets of eyes are often better than one when it comes to spotting all the cool birds!

Not sure if this is a baby Cattle Egret or baby Little Blue, but it's adorable regardless.

The Little Blue and egret youngsters were loud and boisterous, many of the older ones walking around the branches and flapping their growing wings. Sometimes they'd get overexcited when a parent came in to feed them, squawking, pecking their siblings, even chasing down and almost tackling the parent. Some of the parents would keep their distance when they arrived back at the nest, as their multiple almost-grown youths run up to them. I saw parents trying to run away from their own children when they begged too aggressively for food.

Young herons are quite the handful, especially as they get older.

You can see here that there are three young Little Blues begging for food from a parent that - for the moment - is just sitting and waiting in the next tree over. The kids almost looked they were dancing as they bobbed their heads and flapped their wings, stretching up tall for their parent's attention.

The Yellow-crowned Night Herons I saw all had mostly grown up children. All the black-crowns I saw were still sitting tight on the nest, with no visible kids.

This was the first time I'd ever seen young Tricolored Herons! Unlike a lot of these heron kids,they've already got colors and patterns very similar to the adults.

Adult Cattle Egret.

Another very exciting thing to see was a family of Moorhens! I describe these birds as "duck chickens", or water chickens - they swim like ducks, look a bit like ducks, but their feet and beak looks more like a chicken's. This family - two adults and four tiny, fluffy chicks - were foraging among the reedy plants at the water line, in front of the trees the herons were nesting in.

They were all out in the open for a little while, but then they started to hide - luckily we got this picture before they hid completely! Look at their bald heads!

There were plenty of flowers, lily pads, dragonflies and butterflies around as well.

And, of course, there are alligators. A vital part of what's keeping this place safe for all those nesting birds. The gators might eat a few unlucky heron babies, but they'll keep all the egg-and-nestling munching predators away.

There were plenty of other birds around too, that may or may not have been nesting nearby, like blackbirds, seagulls, cormorants, and Great-tailed Grackles like this one:

They get all poofy when they make their crackly grackle noises.

It was great to see so many youngsters so close, and to observe such a variety of wildlife. I'll leave you with one last picture, of a lovely backyard snail:

have a great day

Baytown Nature Center tunnel book

What's this? A bird?

And what's this - another bird?

Even more birds?

Of course!

Because this is the Baytown Nature Center, one of my favorite places, mostly because it has a lot of birds! I love the place so much, I made a whimsical little tunnel book to represent and express my love for it. I just couldn't help myself. My hand slipped - and I drew a bunch of birds. Slowly and steadily they grew their way into some sort of multidimensional watercolor painting.

I will confess right away that I enjoyed this immensely. Creating it was tons of fun. Few things are quite so magical and soothing as converting memory and emotion into what feels like a living, breathing work of art. Something you can show your friends and family, something that people can talk about and discuss, something that can sit on your own shelf, reminding you of good things that have made you happy and felt enormously special to you. A fantastic sort of bridge between the physically tangible and the purely emotional, constructed at last! Feels real good. And sometimes you don't know how much something means to you until you pick up a pencil, and suddenly all the feelings come gushing out onto the page and you're left thinking, "Huh, I guess I really care about this!"

Do I care whether other people pick up on that emotion or not, when they look at the piece? Do I care if they get a sense of the memories, of what I see when I visit that nature center? I dunno, I guess so. But that's a secondary concern. It's something I might hope for, I suppose! But it's not my primary goal in the creation of the piece. My goal, I guess, was only: "I want to capture and display aspects of this place that I love, shaped by my own vision, twisted by my own senses, my own heart, in a way that is mine and mine alone." Photographs are pieces and fragments, vivid stills; this is more a love letter or an essay.

Because my goal was mainly to explore my own memories of the place, I decided from the get-go not to be painstakingly realistic, to go more with what memory and imagination said than what photographs might tell you. The flowers, for example, are ridiculous and totally made up, but there are a lot of really cool plants there at the real world nature center, plenty of flowers, plently of grubby water plants and cacti and twisting vines and little trees with completely green skin, and those flowers are a bizarre representation of all that. Something that could exist there, maybe, but doesn't; not quite.

The frog, of course, is exaggerated, as is the crab, and the birds are drawn from memory as well, but my memory for birds is a little more detailed, so they're all specific species, and they're all common and you can see all of them there and at many other places as well. The moderately majestic Great Blue Heron, at the front; the funky White Ibis; the tiny and talented Belted Kingfisher; and the eagle in the back with the fish, that's supposed to be an Osprey.

It's not particularly recognizable as an Osprey, mostly because I realized too late that I'd put two white birds awfully close to one another, and having both the Osprey and the ibis be bright white was going to mess up my composition. Not knowing what else could possibly work, I just went with orangey-brown, thinking, "hmmm, well, maybe it could be a Golden Eagle, too..." even though I've never seen one. Or maybe a young Bald Eagle - something I have seen there? Do they catch fish like that, too? Hm, things I don't know. Anyway, the point is I didn't really know what an Osprey looked like anyway, and fuzzy memories and throwing random birds in random places makes for weird fusion birds that exist only in watercolor paintings.

I should probably mention the background: it features refineries and the Fred Hartman bridge, which you can, of course, see from many places in the nature center. A painting meant to represent my feelings and memories of the place absolutely wouldn't be complete without them. They're a major identifier of the location, and something you can't help but notice when you're there. I would've included a big ship going by as well, but I only had so much space, and the birds were definitely more important.

Some people viewing the piece thought I was making a statement about industry/humanity encroaching on nature, and yeah, I guess you could see it that way, as habitat destruction is all too real and all too widespread. But I was really just trying to describe the place as I saw it. You go there: this is what you see. That's as far as my intention goes.

I personally delight in the contrast, an island of vibrant wildlife surrounded by refineries, neighborhoods, other signs of industry and humanity. You can see the San Jacinto Monument; you can see the Fred Hartman bridge; the ship channel, oil refineries; playgrounds for kids, and people's houses, docks, and recreational boats. To me, the place feels like a sanctuary: not something that's being encroached upon, but one little piece of nature, saved, because the habitat had already been destroyed (the place used to be a neighborhood - when it flooded, it converted to wet lands, wildlife habitat, a park for fishing and birding).

I see it and say yes, the refineries are here, and thank goodness these birds are here, too. Thank goodness these two things can exist in the same picture. It's a sense of relief, more than a sense of peril. I'm thankful and glad, because this little piece of nature - and it does so feel like such a little piece, surrounded by industry as it so visibly is - feels like a little piece of paradise.

Anyway, enough about that! Here's my initial draft sketch:

Little note, actually: though I told you everything was drawn from memory, my memories of what the refineries and the bridge actually looked like were so abysmal (because they're not alive at all, gosh!), that I actually did make a special trip out to the nature center to sketch them. Just a little bit. So that I felt like I could draw something that looked kinda like them. Strengthen those memories, a little! It did help, to sketch for a little while, sit for a while and really have to look at them, and think about their identifying details, and how they work. Because everyone knows I'm looking at the birds when I'm out there, and all those refineries, big ships, even the cool bridge - it all gets only a passing glance.

 A funny thing that happened when I moved to sketching on the watercolor paper, is I drew everything much larger than I did on my draft sketch. This was not intentional at all; I didn't even realize I was doing it. It got so bad, and was so hard for me to correct (I don't know why), that I had to redraw my "Osprey" multiple times, and eventually had to cut out my original drawing to use as a size reference.

As you can see, the "book" was assembled layer by layer, each layer cut and painted separately. I did rough sketches so everything ended up in the right place and looked ok; then painted in watercolor; then outlined those watercolor images in Sharpie marker. Thin Sharpies are my favorite thing, y'all. The outlining was my favorite part.

What I considered a moment of true victory was one of my teachers saying she recognized the bridge, the moment she saw it, and so recognized the entire area. Another was when a different teacher said she could name each of those birds. I remain very glad that I managed to create a recognizable location, and recognizable animal life! I enjoy that.

"Hey, look at all this nature! It exists, and I've found it well worth exploring. There are things to see here, and stories to tell." That's what this painting wants to say, in my very, very humble opinion.

BONUS POINTS! These are wonderfully imaginative and fantastic tunnel books that some of the kids in my class made!

I love these so much. I was tempted to buy all of them, I wanted to look at them all day long. It's such a fun project, and everyone has a different take on it! It was really cool to see the different things that inspired people.

And if you want to see more nature center, maybe to compare with the book, or maybe because you missed the photo post, you can click here to see some photos I took there once upon a time!