Texas Trip :: Day 2 – Laguna Atascosa

After our trip to Santa Ana earlier, my wife convinced me to go back to Laguna Atascosa to see if we could see some new stuff or get better looks at what we’d seen the day before – including trying to see that darned “Blue” Green Jay.

The trip wasn’t as successful as the day before, but it wasn’t fruitless, either. We did two trips around the loop, and had a good time working our way around the path at a crawl, stopping for meadowlarks, osprey and anything else that caught our interest. By the time we got out of there, it was nearly dark and we were starving. Unlike the day before when we had time to get some food, that night we were stuck with Fritos and sodas from the Inn’s fridge as we went through our pictures on the floor.

It turned out that while our bird sightings were smaller than the previous day, we saw a lot of other cool stuff that was a bit harder to identify. I had brought my butterfly and dragonfly guides (Butterflies Through Binoculars – The East (review) and Dragonflies Through Binoculars (review)) but they proved to be limited slightly in trying to ID stuff in Texas, especially the butterfly guide. Luckily, the Inn had a vast collection of guides for all types of things in Texas (and from around the world), so I grabbed a couple of those to help us out. The Audubon Guide to Butterflies helped, but has always proved to be a little less helpful overall in butterfly identification – and this was no exception. I told Shari that we would need to get ourselves a guide to the butterlies of Texas because I was sure that we were going to need it – turns out that she would surprise me the next day with Butterflies Through Binoculars – The West at Sabal Palm.

After watching some TV, we crashed soundly in our comfy bed, ready to head out again the next day…

Bird Tally

LAGUNA ATASCOSA NWR (day 2, including Chachalaca Inn)

More stuff

• George Lucas speaks to the future of Star Wars – particularly regarding the TV series
• The Works of J. Clayton Bright – I used to work for this guy; a random conversation made me think of him. Here’s another site featuring Bright’s work.