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| Gator at the fishing pier. |
It felt like we were driving along the Louisiana coast for a longer than half a day because we kept pulling over at fishing piers and beaches and finding cool critters and situations. The air was hot and salty, a little thick, but the breeze off the Gulf pushed it all around, smoothing the edge between stifling and sufficiently dispersed particles. Once we made it west of the bayous, the gulf waves crashed brown on the straight sandy stretch of beach that touched Texas many miles away. Porpoise backs glimmered in the distant swells. The water was the exact color of exceedingly watered-down cowboy coffee (not that a real cowboy would ever water it down) with flecks of seaweed rather than fragrant coffee grounds. I was at once in a cloud of screaming Least Terns, hovering above like angels but with anger in their cries. When they calmed down and settled back into the sand, I made sure I wasn't near any nests and moved on. I made the happy discovery that my entire bar of chocolate had melted, which meant I got to drink it right then. All of it. We made it to Texas.
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| Carolina Anole, Anolis carolinensis. |
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| That's called a dewlap. Yeah. A dewlap. This is a male displaying to me, probably telling me to fear him and GTFO. |
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| Black-necked Stilt, Himantopus mexicanus. Why this bird is not named after a more prominent feature, say a pink-legged stilt, I do not know, but I think it was interestingly named...yes, it has black on it's neck, but most of it's neck is white...silly ornithologists. |
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| Screaming Angel bird AKA Least Tern, Sternula antillarum. |
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| This Laughing Gull, Leucophaeus atricilla, ushered us out of Louisiana and into the ginormous state of Texas. Or he was begging for food, but gulls don't do that, right? |
