Port Douglas - Part 1

The two-lane road north from Cairns to Port Douglas winds 50 km (31 mi) up the coast past sugar cane fields and beach resorts, and through small towns and tropical rainforest. We passed a large group of wallabies (known as a mob) grazing in a large pasture along the road. I parked next to a lawn bowling complex and, camera in hand, walked around the corner of the building and began taking pictures. A man came out of the building and told us to come inside, but to stay behind the fence because "wallabies can be aggressive if you get too close." Inside the open-air facility, twenty people were bowling in a tournament. One of the women bowlers said that a few weeks earlier, a man taking photographs in the pasture was attacked by a male wallaby.

Agile wallabies

View from a Kayak

I spent the morning kayaking around the islands and channels of Aransas and Redfish bays dodging speeding boats carrying fishermen and fighting a wind gusting 15-20 miles per hour out of the southeast. I launched my kayak at the public boat ramp. On the return trip, I had to avoid pickup trucks with trailers backing down the ramp to load their boats. I lifted my kayak onto the sidewalk next to the ramp and a man called out “Hey, Mr. Kayak, how was it out there?” “Windy” I replied. He was small and slim, with a sunburned face, and white hair sticking out beneath a tattered baseball cap. “The water’s warmed up; it must be in the 60s” I continued. He was sitting at a picnic table next to the ramp. There were several fillet knives laid out in front of him and he was sharpening one on a rectangular stone. It was hard to tell how old he was; his weathered face added at least a decade to his age.

Channel leading to Aransas Bay from Little Bay

Winter Texans (Part 1)

We rented a house on the Gulf Coast of Texas for a month and ended up staying for three months. We knew the birding would be good and the diving bad, but there were national seashores and wildlife refuges to visit, and coastal bays and estuaries to kayak. And while we had explored West Texas from El Paso to Big Bend National Park on the Rio Grande, we had not spent time in the Coastal Bend.

Rande and the Big Blue Crab, a local Rockport landmark on Little Bay

Beachcomber’s Paradise

After leaving Washington, we headed for the Coastal Bend of Texas for the rest of the winter. I had been to Corpus Christi a couple times on business and the area looked interesting. The northern Gulf of Mexico is well-known for recreational fishing and the coastal marshes and woodlands are birding meccas. We were ready to leave the cold and wet Pacific Northwest. We rented a house in Rockport, about a half-hour east of Corpus (as the locals refer to it), and became honorary “winter Texans” (the Texas equivalent of "snowbirds" of the Southwest). Here’s the first of a couple posts on the interesting things we learned in this corner of the Lone Star State.

Small (coppice) dune on the beach at Padre Island National Seashore

The Crocodile Farm

According to the Ramsar Convention*, Bahía Tenacatita is one of the five most important bays on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Estero La Manzanilla, an estuary on the east side of the bay, supports a mangrove forest in good condition. It is one of three estuaries on the coast with a large population of American crocodiles. During our stay in La Manzanilla, we often walked down a dirt road by the estuary to the restaurants on the beach. A sign said the area was a crocodile farm (cocodrilario) and a sagging chain-link fence was all that separated pedestrians from large crocodiles basking in the sunshine.

Be careful. Crocodiles in this area. Do not swim. Do not feed the crocodiles. Do not walk your pets. Do not fish.