at a pond in texas

Another Edge

big boat, little boats

Coming into Port at Sabine Pass.

southeast texas

Oil Refinery Landscape

drilling for oil at spindletop

Yes, it's windy, but listen for the squeaks of the equipment. This is the past and the future.
Today is 1/1/11.

Port Arthur Oil Refinery

Working Night and Day

in texas

At Ponds #2 & #3

a little time travel

Back to Bolivar Peninsula in Texas for a moment.

This is a shark, an unhappy shark, a soon-to-be-dead and eaten shark. The fellow whose arm is holding the creature was smoking a cigar about the size of the shark and was very pleased with himself. 

The shark's skin is like metallic velvet: smooth when stroked towards the tail and like sandpaper in the opposite direction.

Other people on the beach were offering fresh shark meat for me to take home.

hurricane ike, 7 months later

Today is the start of the hurricane season. There is a good NPR story on this here. 

In September 2008, Hurricane Ike came through southern Texas and continued on up through the Midwest and into Canada. Remember that? The areal image above was taken soon after by NOAA to survey the damage.

Yesterday, this is what the area looks like. New construction (!) is going on. You can see the new houses in the background in this image.

There is lots of clean-up still going on.

sunday relaxation

South of Beaumont, Texas, on the way to the beach on the Gulf of Mexico, is this little place called High Island, because it is a salt dome bump on the land that is higher than the landscape around it. And there is a Houston Audubon Society site. These roseate spoonbills and cormorants were doing their Sunday things. Check out the bathing beauties in the middle there.

Also relaxing nearby was this alligator who sat so still and so patiently than a dragonfly sat on his head for a little while. The alligator kept hold of that stick in his mouth for a long while, too.

everything is bigger in texas. . .

. . . including fire hydrants? Only this one that is made out of fiberglass or some heavy-duty plastic (we are in the land of petroleum, after all). The Fire Museum of Texas is here in Beaumont. So, add this to the list of large things to see in America, folks.

this is what we saw

Village Creek State Park connects two parts of Big Thicket National Preserve. Village Creek runs through it and then there are these bodies of waters called sloughs, pronounced slew. Yup, that's right.
And then, we came across this red-eared slider, a turtle; she was laying eggs...can you see them in the hole?

alert: man-eating plant!

This is a pitcher plant just standing in the bog, la-di-la, looking pretty, doo-di-dum-dum.












This is a pitcher plant digesting its food. Some greedy, hungry insects were lured by the pitcher plant's prettiness, went down its gullet looking for sweet stuff, and got stuck in it. Revenge is what is sweet, here.

lush greenery . . .

. . . or green lushness; you choose. Village Creek runs through Big Thicket Preserve. Check out all the mostly-unfamiliar-to-us-northerners vegetation.

calming water

On one of today's excusions at Big Thicket National Preserve, we walked down to this, Rush Creek. It's in a ravine, which is unusual in this part of Texas; it's mostly flat in the pineywoods, except where some of the streams have cut their ways as tributaries to the Neches River.

snake alert

At Big Thicket National Preserve, where I am taking a field course on the ecology and natural history of the place, we came across this little-bitty grey rat snake. Nonvenomous, and here's how you can tell: the pupils are round like ours. On poisonous snakes, the pupils are vertical slits. So, although this fellow could—and did—bite, it wasn't harmful.