Bird Walk

Spring break is in full force here. The beaches are crazy with people.

Everywhere you look there are kids, kites, cars, bikinis, boom boom music and cops stopping kids. Most of them are pretty good, but we hear sirens often throughout the day & night.

Mom and I still walk in the early morning, but by the time I’m off work there isn’t any going to the beach or to the stores.  There are just too many people around this week. So we decided to go to a new part of town where they have a large birding area. It’s all walking paths with no vehicles allowed (so most of the spring break crowd doesn’t go there). 

Sadly the water was too low and we didn’t see many birds. We did see a White Ibis.

And lots and lots of sea gulls and laughing gulls.

Mom and I found some cool little shells in the dry flats that we don’t ever get to see on the beach.

And wildflowers.

And Fiddler crabs and their holes. The actual crabs are only about 1 1/2” long and their holes are only maybe 1/2”. It was interesting to see the round balls of mud & sand that they pull from the holes and the patterns that their claws make.

And a HUGE Desert King Snake. It was probably 3 or 4 feet long. After we saw him I wasn’t all too happy about going into any grassy areas (we looked him up and thankfully he was non-venomous). We also saw a big Jack Rabbit running down a path.

We spent probably 4 hours checking out everything and had a great day. Mom and Doug headed back to the truck and Al and I wanted to go one more place that I thought may have some more shells. I saw a couple shells on a rock in the water that I just had to have so Al obligingly went in to get them for me and……broke his flip flop.

We were about a mile away from the car and the path was nothing but rocks, sparse grass and full of sand burrs. And Al only has one shoe.  And it was almost dusk and it was time for the mosquitos to come out.

He limped along for a bit getting his foot full of sand burrs.  He even finally did the “you go ahead, don’t wait for me” thing. Until he got the bright idea to take off his sweatshirt and make a shoe!

 

We got some funny looks, but it worked!