Our last field trip of the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival was to Cactus Creek Ranch – thorn-scrub woodlands and coastal prairie.

As we entered the ranch, there was a big pond to the left of the road…..and it had a resident alligator!

I took a few macro pictures of cactus as we got out of the vans near the house. The public rooms of the house are full of art and Cactus Creek Ranch conservation signs.

Around the house are bird houses and feeders…pots and sculptures…structures covering ant hills to protect the horned toads feeding on the ants!

A little further away from the house – there was a Vermillion Flycatcher and deer.

We drove around in the vans and the host’s golf cart. There were several good views of Belted Kingfishers.

I made a video of a female eating a small fish! It is handheld so not great – but it captures the 17 seconds of action!

A pair of Crested Caracaras were in a treetop – turning their backs to us!

There was a snake in one of the ponds. My picture is not good enough to determine the type although others in the group saw rattles!

We stopped at another place and I did some macro photos of a dragonfly, a succulent, and a busy wasp nest.

In the distance there were Wood Storks and an immature Little Blue Heron….3 sandhill cranes flew overhead.

At another stop, our host spread some corn on the ground, and we stood back to watch the Bobwhite.

On the way back to the house, there was a road runner beside the road! It was the only one I managed to photograph this trip!

We enjoyed the barbeque at the end of the trip and headed back to the Harlingen Convention Center and headed out on the first leg of our drive home. We stopped in San Marcos TX before driving the rest of the way home the next day.

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Performance of the Year | The Prairie Ecologist – Video of an Eastern Hognose Snake pretending to be dangerous.

Millennia-Old Rock Art in Israel Offers Window into Lost Culture | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine – Monuments 4,000 years old…dolmens. There are more than 400 in the same area. A survey of them started 2012 after the first rock art engravings were discovered (14 trident-like shapes on the ceiling of a large dolmen).

Backyard Birding in Central India to Beat Lockdown – Backyard birding - something that is happening around the world during the pandemic!

Granite tors evidence of ice-free Alaska - The Field - AGU Blogosphere – Tors mark the Pleistocene pathway that was free of glaciers for plants and animals during the ice age.

Great, Warm Lakes – This is an article from a month ago…I’m just getting around to reading it. The surface temperatures were warmer than usual as of July…in some of the lakes there are areas warmer by more than 4 degrees C (including most of Lake Michigan)!

Restoration of Sicily’s Temple of Zeus Continues - Archaeology Magazine - A 26-foot-tall sculpture of Atlas dated to the 5th century BC…and there might have been as many as 40 such statues.

Winners of International Photo Contest Celebrate the Art of Movement – Capturing a moment…freezing motion.

Blood-thinner with no bleeding side-effects is here – Still work to be done….the current formulation is filtered out by the kidneys very quickly. It has applicability in artificial lungs (used to bridge the time between lung failure and lung transplantation) currently.

Poor Everglades Nesting Season A Result of Climate Change and Untimely Storms – It appears that 2020 isn’t a good year for roseate spoonbills and wood storks in Florida.

This Medieval Potion Kills Stubborn Bacteria – “Bald’s eyesalve” – garlic, onion, wine, cow bile. It appears to be effective at combating antibiotic resistant bacterial strains…biofilms that are particularly challenging to kill…including diabetic foot infections.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

3 racoons. Our birdfeeder camera made a video of some visitors to our deck just before 2 AM on Wednesday, 8/5: three racoons! They looked smaller than the female that came several times earlier in the summer. Perhaps they were her young….out foraging on their own (maybe she was nearby). They were no more successful than she was getting seed from our squirrel proof birdfeeder! The action started with one up on the deck railing under the feeder and another 2 directly below on the deck floor. The one on the railing comes down almost on top of one that was on the deck floor. The one that was on the deck railing stayed in the video the longest…thoroughly searching under the feeder after going down to the deck floor.

2020 08 IMG_1223 (2).jpg — **Sycamore branch**. Back on August 2nd I posted about a dead branch in our Sycamore tree (picture on the left). My husband discovered the branch on the ground near the base of the tree when he went out to use the weed eater and it took both of us to pulled it to our brush pile at the edge of the forest. It came down without bringing a lot of other branches with it….a little sooner than I expected but probably brought on by the thunderstorms that have been sweeping through the past few days.

Yellow wooly bear. My sister sent me a picture of a caterpillar from her garden in Carrollton, Texas. It appears to be a yellow wooly bear that becomes a Virginian Tiger Moth. Evidently, they are common but neither one of us had seen one before.