Three more things at Brazoria

Here are three more finds from the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge on October 6th.
The first is the egg case of a Carolina mantis, Stagmomantis carolina.

Next you have the flower head of a camphor daisy, Rayjacksonia phyllocephala. It’s unusual for a genus to be created from someone’s first and last name, in this case Ray + Jackson (for Dr. Raymond C. Jackson). I assume that happened because Jacksonia was already in use for something else.

And finally you have the remains of a crayfish (a.k.a. crawfish or crawdad):

After 10 posts with 21 pictures from Brazoria, we’ll finally move on in the next post.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

My first alligator

The first time I ever saw an American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) in the wild was on October 6th in the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge. Here’s the rap sheet approach again, with front and side views.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

 

The water without the lilies

The previous post showed you water lilies at the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge on October 6th. One adjacent span of water interested me in its own right because of its rippled surface. Funny, I don’t even remember a breeze, yet without one I couldn’t have recorded this textured abstraction.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Tropical water lilies

One prominent wildflower at the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge on October 6th was the tropical water lily, Nymphaea elegans, which most would agree is elegant. The photograph above shows a group of those flowers opening. Next you have a me-and-my-shadow view of a mostly open flower:

And then you have a closer, more isolating, lower-angled, and limited-focus portrait:

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Great white herons at the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge

On the roof of a shelter at the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge on October 6th we saw a great white heron, Casmerodius albus. Half an hour later I got a lot closer to one that was unfortunately behind branches which had me struggling to aim through them for a clear shot. The busy background also fell short of ideal, but we photographers sometimes have to take things as they come to us. Now that I think about it, having my first and last initial come to me in the form of a heron’s neck isn’t so bad.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Where there are ducks there may also be duckweed

A few posts back you saw ducks gliding on a pond at the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge on October 6th. Near those ducks I photographed several abstractions created by the duckweed, Lemna minor, that covered portions of the pond. I don’t know the identity of the other tiny plants that were mixed in.

At this scale you’ll have trouble discerning all the tiny things in the images.
Click the thumbnail below to see an enlarged excerpt from the first picture:

Here’s a more expansive view showing the interface between duckweed and bulrushes:

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Giant bristlegrass

Near where we first parked at the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge on October 6th was some giant bristlegrass, Setaria magna. I scrunched and strained to get into a position from which I could play the seed head off against the cumulus clouds overhead. The result shown here strikes me as an emblem—of what, I can’t say, though the cloud nebulously recalls the shape of Antarctica.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Bulrush reflections

Bulrushes and water lilies were common at the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge, as you see above. In one place without water lilies the bulrushes drew my attention by the way they made reflections in the water. Of my two dozen experiments in trying to record those abstract reflections, the one below strikes me as the most interesting; I can almost imagine that someone had knitted or woven the image.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

More birds at the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge

How about the long common name black-bellied whistling duck and the scientific name Dendrocygna autumnalis (whose genus confusingly means tree swan)? We saw a group of those birds at the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge on October 6th. A quintet that I watched placidly gliding by reminded me of a longer single file I’d seen two years earlier in Alberta. (Click each picture to enlarge.)

As for those buds rising from the water on erect stalks, they’re Nymphaea elegans, called tropical water lilies. I’ll devote a future post to them in their own right.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Brazoria Wildlife Refuge

After we all spent time at the Artist Boat Coastal Heritage Preserve on October 6th, Shannon and Scott went off on what proved a successful quest to find a rare bird that had been reported in the vicinity. Linda drove Eve and me off in the opposite direction so we could swing around and visit the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge, where it turned out that we, too, had some avian encounters. This post shows you one of them.

Don’t you think someone should train each kind of bird to sit on a sign for its own species and not on one for a different species? That way the tourists wouldn’t get confused. Our mismatched bird wasn’t a roseate spoonbill but rather a double-crested cormorant, Phalacrorax auritus. It made up for not knowing its place by sitting docilely on the sign as I slowly got closer and closer with my 400mm lens. Linda and Eve, who were watching from the car, thought I’d soon be able to reach out and pet the cormorant. Well, not quite, but I did get much nearer than I thought I would, as you can confirm from the uncropped closeup below, which I took seven minutes after the first picture. (Click to enlarge each portrait.)

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman