Monday, February 6th

When I walked out of work today it was GORGEOUS outside!!! We’ve had many days of icky weather and it was so nice to see the sun and blue skies again. I decided to stop at the nearby Bay Area park to check it out and and take some pictures. Yeah, well it actually turned into 350 pictures (no, I’m not exaggerating!). I had a really hard time narrowing them down to the best 20 or so!

This was my favorite picture of the day because it reminds me of one you would see in a fancy magazine. I feel so professional! The bird is a Great White Egret. I took an awesome picture of another Great White Egret in Seabrook on day #27.

This park is on Armand Bayou and there was a really low tide at the park which made for some neat pictures.

And today was definitely a bird BONANZA! I can’t believe how many different birds I saw…and I didn’t even get a (good) picture of them all!

I think this is a Tri-colored Heron:

And this is a Snowy Egret. It is a little smaller than the Great White Egret and has a black beak, opposed to a yellow beak.

Here’s another shot of that guy…

I decided to explore some other areas of the park. I think the biggest issue I had today was that it was so bright out that some of my aperture settings were off…this is definitely something I want to keep working on.

You can really see how far the tide is out in this picture.

There is a really cool walkway that takes you around the wetland area.

It was really neat to watch this flock of seagulls.

I love the reflections in this picture. That bird was really fluffy!

The water looks so still here.

I think these lone trees sticking out of the water are neat! Can you tell?

This is definitely my second favorite picture of the day! I am not sure why the background looks a little hazy though. But the perched seagull looks really cool!

So I was about to drive out of the park and I noticed there was a pond with a bunch of what I though were ducks. So I went to check it out.

Yeah, turns out they were big old geese and they weren’t happy with me being so close!

I think the coolest bird I saw was this African Goose. No, I actually didn’t know what it was at the time…I had to look it up! The white one to the left with the big nose is a White Chinese Goose. Both are from Asia and were apparently imported (pre 1900?) into the US as domestic geese.

Then this guy decided to take a dip in the little pond. One of these African Geese actually charged at me when I got way too close. I was too busy running away to get a picture though :)

This big fluffy white bird was so cool! I don’t know what kind it is though…definitely not a swan. He’s got a fluffy bottom (see 3 pictures up). Maybe he’s an import too since he was hanging out with other geese. He looks kind of like a statue…and on one leg!

I love that the park has all these trees covered in Spanish Moss.

This was all I could find as far as wild flowers! Just a tiny touch of color in all the green and brown. I can’t wait until the bluebonnets come out in a couple of months!

I will definitely have to go back another day as I didn’t take pictures of everything. My batteries died and I had already been there for an hour. Maybe I’ll catch a glimpse of an alligator next time!

Until later, happy picture taking!