A Ride In The Country

Yesterday was the first morning we have woken up without it raining.  This area is saturated with many flooded creeks and rivers.  We were ready to get out of the house for a while!

We’re supposed to put 1000 miles on our new truck before towing so we decided today would be a good day to get some miles in.

Our place is in the beautiful Texas hill country.  Since the area north of us has had the most rain and road closures, we headed south west toward Uvalde.  Uvalde is about 70 miles from the Mexico border.  There are many enormous ranches along the route we took, some with very pretty entrance gates.

This area has also gotten plenty of rain and the creeks and rivers were running full.

Luckily, this is the only low water crossing we came to that still had water. The water was about 6" deep and wasn't flowing, so we crossed safely. 

This area is definitely cotton country!  We hadn't seen round bales of picked cotton like this before, but they seemed very popular here. 

We had planned on stopping at the Uvalde National Fish Hatchery.  We like to visit fish hatcheries.  We’ve volunteered at a couple of them and are always interested in how different hatcheries operate.

Unfortunately, this one was closed on Saturdays!

Since our main goal today was to put miles on the truck, we weren’t too disappointed.  Our next stop was Cooks Slough Sanctuary and Nature Park.  Cooks Slough is a water recycling center that treats waste water before discharging it into the Leona River about 10 miles away.

There are more than 2 miles of hiking trails on these 25 acres of wetland.

We didn’t see a lot of variety in birds but the few we did see were outstanding! Our very first bird was a Vermillion Flycatcher. You've pretty much got to come as far south as Texas to find this beauty. 

After flying from the post to a tree, it gave us great looks at it's outstretched wings. They look almost transparent in this picture. 

While not nearly as colorful, this Lincoln's Sparrow reminded us that sparrows are on their way to Texas for the winter!

We found ourselves surrounded by butterflies.  There were hundreds of Bodered Patch butterflies. This tropical species makes it way up into Texas and seemed to like this habitat a great deal. 

Many of them were paired off and mating. Can you see the smaller male behind this female, with his abdomen curled up to touch hers?

We also noticed hundreds of caterpillars. We think that these are also Bordered Patch caterpillars, with the orange ones being older. 

After a very enjoyable walk around the sanctuary it was getting close to lunch time.  Mark had done a little research before leaving home and found a great restaurant to try.

There are lots of great plane paintings on the walls and ceiling fans built to look like wooden propellers. 

After lunch we passed many more cotton fields on the drive back home.