Boatriding Birds
If you left our house in a boat tomorrow and traveled south and then north for a total of about 
5000 miles you would end up somewhere near San Diego. We just finished doing that in reverse – from San Diego, through the Panama Canal and ending in Florida (near enough for our purposes here). We spent the last day of the trip on Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas - picture at left. That is one long trip by water, but an exciting one courtesy of Holland America Cruise Lines. I’m just putting this in to mark our return to the wonderful Atchafalaya River. I was very pleased to find that the river didn’t do that out-of-season seven foot rise that was predicted for it last week. It did come up about four feet, but that didn’t do any harm to the dock aside from floating several trees up against it. I’ll work those free tomorrow. It’s good to be back.
One interesting Louisiana-related thing that happened is that a peregrine falcon sort of adopted
the ship about 100 miles north of Colombia as we headed back north (click on the picture to enlarge it). This could very well have been a falcon that left Louisiana a week or so ago, headed for South America. Instead of reaching South America, it stayed with the ship (no doubt eating the other birds that constantly used the ship for a rest stop) all the way back to Florida. In other words it flew about 2000 miles south over water only to hitch a ride with the ship back north for 2000 miles. It ended about where it started before heading south in the first place. This was also true of some of the small warblers that stayed with the ship for a day or two. They flew almost to South America, only to ride the ship back north for however long they stayed on it. Odd.
Said river is at 3.9 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, and will stay about the same for the next five days. The Mississippi is falling all the way up but the Ohio is rising, probably due to that unseasonable snow they had a couple of days ago.
Rise and Shine, Jim
5000 miles you would end up somewhere near San Diego. We just finished doing that in reverse – from San Diego, through the Panama Canal and ending in Florida (near enough for our purposes here). We spent the last day of the trip on Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas - picture at left. That is one long trip by water, but an exciting one courtesy of Holland America Cruise Lines. I’m just putting this in to mark our return to the wonderful Atchafalaya River. I was very pleased to find that the river didn’t do that out-of-season seven foot rise that was predicted for it last week. It did come up about four feet, but that didn’t do any harm to the dock aside from floating several trees up against it. I’ll work those free tomorrow. It’s good to be back.One interesting Louisiana-related thing that happened is that a peregrine falcon sort of adopted
the ship about 100 miles north of Colombia as we headed back north (click on the picture to enlarge it). This could very well have been a falcon that left Louisiana a week or so ago, headed for South America. Instead of reaching South America, it stayed with the ship (no doubt eating the other birds that constantly used the ship for a rest stop) all the way back to Florida. In other words it flew about 2000 miles south over water only to hitch a ride with the ship back north for 2000 miles. It ended about where it started before heading south in the first place. This was also true of some of the small warblers that stayed with the ship for a day or two. They flew almost to South America, only to ride the ship back north for however long they stayed on it. Odd.Said river is at 3.9 feet on the Butte La Rose gauge, and will stay about the same for the next five days. The Mississippi is falling all the way up but the Ohio is rising, probably due to that unseasonable snow they had a couple of days ago.
Rise and Shine, Jim
posted by jim | 8:50 PM
1 Comments:
Welcome back. Just curious, did you test the salinity of the water down yonder? I always like to kid your once DEQ co-worker, Dugan, on the accuracy of his salt-o-meter in determining water salinity. He claims it to be very accurate. Although I have no way to know for sure, I like to give him a rough time on his assessment.
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