Our nephews are staying with us over the summer. Keeping them busy has been quite a task, but that's the only way to wear them out. Last week, we went dragonfly hunting across the street at Hermann Park. We spent about an hour along the edge of the water, looking for dragonflies. I promised them that we'd catch a few dragonflies and then look at them up close, but, having never chased dragonflies, I under-estimated how difficult it would be to catch them. Dragonflies are much like birds; they are wary of predators and will not let you get close. In flight, it is almost impossible to catch them as they quickly detect my net swooping at them and then, at the moment I am sure I've got a dragonfly in my net, they suddenly dart to the right or to the left, a zig and zag, eluding all my attempts to catch them on the wing. And then they're gone. They remember their brief encounter with me the predator, and after half a dozen swoops of the net, it seems all dragonflies have cleared out and moved down the creek or out beyond the water's edge, just a little too far for my reach. Trying to net them while they're perched on the tip of emergent vegetation along the water's edge didn't fare much better. Their big round eyes almost gives them 360 degree surveillance. You definitely can't approach from the front, but it's not much better approaching from behind.
After about 50 or so attempts, the kids were getting frustrated and wondering how long it would take for me to catch a dragonfly. They wanted to try, so I handed the net over to them, but of course, they didn't do much better. Instead of creeping up stealthily and quietly, they would run at the dragonfly, screaming. Dragonflies are smart.
Our break finally came when I noticed a male Eastern Pondhawk sitting on a dead branch about 8 feet high. Most of the time, the dragonflies perched at much lower heights. I thought this time I would come from below and surprise it. I told the kids to freeze and stay quiet just for a minute as I crept up from below, methodically moving my net into the optimum position... and then with a quick flick of the wrist, I ambushed the pondhawk from below. Success! The kids were ecstatic. Down came the Pondhawk and with the help of the kids, we got the pondhawk into a plastic jar for close observation.
I figured out the secret. Pondhawks can't see very well just below them. To test this out, I waited for another opportunity. It took another 20 minutes before we could get another pondhawk sitting up high, and yet not so high that it would be out of my reach. Whack. I got it with one try. I figured out their Achilles heel. We put this pondhawk into the bottle as well. The kids wanted me to catch another one, but this time, they wanted a different one. They wanted the red-looking ones, which I couldn't identify. These were even smarter than the pondhawks, but occasionally one would sit up high. So I waited. 10 minutes. 20 minutes. 30 minutes... at this point, I decided it was enough. It was just getting too hot and we were all sweating.
We studied the dragonflies a bit, or at least that's what I tried to do. The kids way of studying the dragonflies was to shake the bottle and rile up the little dragons so that they would buzz around in the jar and make a lot of noise. I have to say, it was quite funny, though seemingly a bit cruel, especially after one of the dragonflies decided that it should eat the other one. The kids thought that was cool, but I decided it was time to let the dragons go.
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The next day, we went over to the Bolivar peninsula (that was last weekend) to teach them how to catch blue crabs. I knew that blue crabs abound at Bolivar as I would often see them in the estuary when I would wade out there looking for birds. And even when I didn't see them, I knew they were around because there were always lots of shallow wallows in the mud, just about the size of one's hand. Sometimes if I waded slowly enough, like a heron, I would occasionally spook one of the crabs out of its wallow, and then all one would see is a trail of "dust" shoot out from the wallow as the crab scurried and half-swimmed away through the murky water. So they were there.
Unfortunately, when we arrived, the tide was very high and it was impossible to wade for little kids. I threw a drumstick tied to a long string out into the water and told them all we had to do was wait. However, it seems you have to have a lot of patience if you want to crabbing or fishing. The kids obviously didn't have this patience, and I have to admit, I'm not one for waiting around, so after about 15 minutes with no catch, I decided we should try elsewhere.
We went over to the bolivar jetty, a long dike made up of llano granite, built to protect the Galveston ship channel from being filled with sediment transported by longshore currents form the east. We walked out on the jetty for about a hundred yards and set up our crabbing gear - string and a piece of chicken. I hurled a couple of drumsticks out into the water, and we waited... and we waited... ten minutes with kids seemed like an eternity, especially since it was almost a hundred degrees. No crabs, nothing. Then suddenly, from out of nowhere, there was a sea turtle! I screamed "Sea Turtle! Sea Turtle! Sea Turtle!". I had never seen a sea turtle in Texas before. Everyone got to see the turtle before it darted back into the murky depths of the water. The kids loved it, so did everyone else. This was better than a crab. We all decided it was best to wait and see if the turtle would come up again. Over the next 20 minutes, the turtle made several more, brief appearances. But at one point, it actually came up to one of our drumsticks, nibbled it for about a few minutes while we all held our breath. That was the last time we saw it.
Fortunately, we were able to take some photos. The photo above shows a Green Sea Turtle. I was hoping for a Ridley's Sea Turtle, because that's much rarer. However, a Green Sea Turtle is still an amazing thing to see along the Texas coast. Globally, they are an endangered species. In the Atlantic, most nest out in Ascension Island and make pilgrimages to the mainland to lay eggs. In the Gulf of Mexico waters, there is only a small population, most of them occuring in Florida and only a few records of nests along the Texas margin. Based on a bunch of reading I did when I came home, the sea turtle we saw looks like a juvenile. Perhaps it was lost.
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Yesterday, I went back out to Bolivar, this time by myself. I needed a little piece and quiet. I was hoping to get out and catch the shorebird migration kicking in, but when I got out there, the tide was high (I find it so hard to predict the tides here) and it was raining. There were not a lot of shorebirds, so I decided to focus in on the terns and Laughing gulls. Some of the terns were loafing about behind the dunes. Others were out and about over the gulf. I've seen these terns thousands and thousands of times, but since I had nothing better to do, I thought I'd just sit and watch them for the three thousandth and one time. As I was watching, I noticed something that, embarrassingly, I had not noticed before or at least not consciously noticed. From a long distance, where one is deprived of a comparative scale, Royal and Caspian Terns are actually difficult to tell apart. All you can see is a bulk white tern flying, too far to make out color of bill, etc. But yet, I always felt I could tell them apart, intuitively, but I couldn't put my finger on why they looked different. Perhaps, I never really cared that much, but at that moment, while sitting out in the rain, I realized that the Caspian Terns seemed to always fly with their heavy bills angled downward, whereas the Royal Terns seemed to keep their bills in line with their bodies, giving a very straight appearance.
The above sketch is what I did based on memory from yesterday's field outing. I have tried to show the Caspian Tern's distinctive posture, which is diagnostic even without the aid of binoculars or telescopes. The lesson I learned yesterday was that even if you've looked at the same thing a thousand times, there's always something new to be found, but the mind has to be prepared. In my case, it seems that just relaxing the mind and pretending that I was looking at these terns for the first time in my life allowed me to see something I had missed for over 20 years. A little embarrassing, even more so if this feature is described already in field guides. It was new to me.
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