Sunrise at Carden Alvar

What a wonderful day birding at the Carden Alvar, a rocky plain which is home to many threatened and endangered species.

We started our day at 4:30 AM (crazy) and got to the meeting point at 6:00. The dawn was gorgeous. Every blade of grass was covered in tiny droplets of dew.

We were assigned to bird on the Cameron Ranch. It's huge and normally people aren't allowed on it. What I love is there are no sounds or sights of human anywhere -- just the grass, the flowers, the trees, the extraordinary birds and a huge sky.

We spent our morning counting birds, then we spent the rest of the day with our friends - ice cream, the marsh and laughter. 10 out of 10 for the day.

Nature Notes


The highlights for the day:
- seeing every stone overturned because bears had been searching for grubs
- flushing a white tail deer and watching it bounding over the grass
- finding an American Bittern all by myself hiding motionless in the reeds
- the multitude of special birds for the area: Brown Thrasher, towhee, clay, song, savannah, grasshopper sparrows, meadowlarks, horned larks and upland sandpipers

Edit: this picture only captures one aspect of this amazing landscape. I wanted to capture the sense of space, the far away horizon, the expanse. I found one of my pictures that comes close so I put in in my blipfolio here.