A beautiful summer day today reaching up to 80 degrees. It was blustery though and the park was as usual very interesting. Doug had us booked for a an 8 am morning birding tour traveling on the park's electric golf-cart type trolley train for 10 people. Thank you Doug!!
We made our lunch last evening and got all our clothes and stuff together. Everything looked ready and calm. By the time we left at7:30 am. We were supposed to leave by 7:15, to allow for getting lost (we didn't) to meet up with our friend Doug and several guides and park visitors. Once we were on the road....one of us had forgotten her money, another one had forgotten the memory card for her camera and the other had forgotten to turn off the coffee maker and another had forgotten to lock the car (I am guilty for this and one of the others mentioned). HAHA, so the best of plans can and will go awry! We made it to Estero on time!
It was great to go on the trolley tour up and down the trails where one usually has to walk. We birded until noon and we must have traveled at least 5 miles over the morning. We were kind of surprised to the Snow Geese there! There were Blue Morphs in the group also. This just means one thing, even Snow Geese escape the Canadian winter. They were pretty flying by in the sky and I was expecting them to be White Pelicans. By the time the tour was over and with the brisk wind it was around 80 degrees and it was hot. We had some wonderful views of Pauraque,Yellow-crowned Night Heron, Green Jay, Cinnamon Teal, Mottled Ducks, Harris' Hawk, Vermilion Flycatcher and many others. We learned about certain plants and berries and trees from our able guides Huck and Doug and our driver/birding guide. We enjoyed this day very much. The last bird of the tour was a pale Great Horned Owl.
We all got lovely photos. See below. Sometimes it was so windy it was hard to take a photo. It was a stiff wind on the high ridges of the trails so much so that we had to hold on to our hats. The park was busy and we saw three different kinds of hummingbirds. After our picnic lunch outside on a bench we walked to a new bird blind that has just been finished and has several different feeding stations and a little running water over the rocks fountain. In the deadly heat of the coming summer this will be a busy place. Today birds were coming in for the food, so we saw Green Jay, Black-crested Titmouse and a White-winged Dove in a few minutes. We met several very nice visitors over the day also, people with interesting lives.
After we left Estero I have a friend who lives down the same road as Estero, so we dropped in for a visit to her very nice trailer/tract home park. There is a club house and a pool which was well used as we saw several people walking back from the pool with a towel. In addition, there were people on golf-carts and bicycles riding about in the development. It looks to be a very well taken care of community. We saw the latest projects by our friend who gets ideas from Wayfare. It was a very nice visit and we plan to come back for another visit before we go. We returned to Alamo for supper at home and a discussion of the day's birds and happenings! Plus there was the latest news on TV, so never a boring moment with us.
In the five years since my last visit, I thought the Main Street and Square of Alamo has been gentrified a bit, cleaned up and is much nicer than it was. The same goes for the accommodations.
Both Barbr and Colleen have gone to bed now and I will soon follow as it was a busy day and tomorrow we are going birding again to another one of the nearby parks. Here are some photos of the day taken by the three of us.
We made our lunch last evening and got all our clothes and stuff together. Everything looked ready and calm. By the time we left at7:30 am. We were supposed to leave by 7:15, to allow for getting lost (we didn't) to meet up with our friend Doug and several guides and park visitors. Once we were on the road....one of us had forgotten her money, another one had forgotten the memory card for her camera and the other had forgotten to turn off the coffee maker and another had forgotten to lock the car (I am guilty for this and one of the others mentioned). HAHA, so the best of plans can and will go awry! We made it to Estero on time!
It was great to go on the trolley tour up and down the trails where one usually has to walk. We birded until noon and we must have traveled at least 5 miles over the morning. We were kind of surprised to the Snow Geese there! There were Blue Morphs in the group also. This just means one thing, even Snow Geese escape the Canadian winter. They were pretty flying by in the sky and I was expecting them to be White Pelicans. By the time the tour was over and with the brisk wind it was around 80 degrees and it was hot. We had some wonderful views of Pauraque,Yellow-crowned Night Heron, Green Jay, Cinnamon Teal, Mottled Ducks, Harris' Hawk, Vermilion Flycatcher and many others. We learned about certain plants and berries and trees from our able guides Huck and Doug and our driver/birding guide. We enjoyed this day very much. The last bird of the tour was a pale Great Horned Owl.
We all got lovely photos. See below. Sometimes it was so windy it was hard to take a photo. It was a stiff wind on the high ridges of the trails so much so that we had to hold on to our hats. The park was busy and we saw three different kinds of hummingbirds. After our picnic lunch outside on a bench we walked to a new bird blind that has just been finished and has several different feeding stations and a little running water over the rocks fountain. In the deadly heat of the coming summer this will be a busy place. Today birds were coming in for the food, so we saw Green Jay, Black-crested Titmouse and a White-winged Dove in a few minutes. We met several very nice visitors over the day also, people with interesting lives.
After we left Estero I have a friend who lives down the same road as Estero, so we dropped in for a visit to her very nice trailer/tract home park. There is a club house and a pool which was well used as we saw several people walking back from the pool with a towel. In addition, there were people on golf-carts and bicycles riding about in the development. It looks to be a very well taken care of community. We saw the latest projects by our friend who gets ideas from Wayfare. It was a very nice visit and we plan to come back for another visit before we go. We returned to Alamo for supper at home and a discussion of the day's birds and happenings! Plus there was the latest news on TV, so never a boring moment with us.
In the five years since my last visit, I thought the Main Street and Square of Alamo has been gentrified a bit, cleaned up and is much nicer than it was. The same goes for the accommodations.
Both Barbr and Colleen have gone to bed now and I will soon follow as it was a busy day and tomorrow we are going birding again to another one of the nearby parks. Here are some photos of the day taken by the three of us.
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