Baby birds behave in unexpected ways. This is because they are idiots. I have mentioned this before in passing, but this post will be almost entirely about the incompetence of juvenile birds and referring to two in particular: a Coopers Hawk and a Great-Tailed Grackle. It is a heroic tale of peril, escape, and maternal… Read more »
Almost every time I walk under the bat bridge I see a Black-crowned Night Heron (BCNH) or two and they are almost always standing still. I imagined that they were waiting for a baby bat or egg, or who knows what, to fall at their feet and provide a meal. These were apparently lazy birds… Read more »
Usually, when I’m on my Buffalo Bayou Park rambles, I will encounter something interesting, take bunches of photos and then use my nature library, knowledgeable fellow Master Naturalists and the Internet to figure out what the heck I saw and then write it up in an authoritative tone as though I had come armed with… Read more »
There are a ton of mulberry trees along the bayou. They bear sweet black berries (that look kind of like blackberries) in the spring. They are a very important food source for wild critters. They are also a decent food source for us more civilized critters, too. Right now, the European Starlings are feasting on… Read more »
For the next few weeks, there is a spectacle of nature taking place right under the Waugh Drive Bridge. Not the bats, although they live there, too, but the Cliff Swallows. The colony has almost 100 birds. Each Spring, the colony returns from South America and refurbishes their mud nests that are built on the… Read more »
One of the things I have always loved about Houston is how persistent our natural world is. I’m from up north, where each spring you race to coax the season from the ground hoping that life will finally return to the world. Here, you spend all your time hacking back everything you have declared unworthy,… Read more »