In Texas the Brazos River starts somewhere near Lubbock and flows into the Gulf of Mexico about 50 miles West of Galveston Texas. We visited the Brazos in Brazos Bend State Park about fifty miles south of Houston. Now Houston is the largest city in Texas so we carefully tiptoed around the edges of the city to get there. Brazos Bend is very rural and that was part of the attraction for us. What we found was bird-watching programs, nature walks, miles of trails and the George Observatory.
Brazos Bend State Park is a large park, we rode bicycle over twelve miles on the paved roads inside the park. On subsequent days we rode another 20 miles on graveled trails alongside the several lakes and the Brazos River itself. Two different mornings we joined birding walks lead by knowledgeable volunteers. Now we are rather novice birders, we have only been at it since 2004. I began logging our sightings two years ago and we have a little over 100 species on our so called “Lifetime List.” This week we added sixteen new species to our list. Of course it really helps to have an expert at your elbow saying, ‘yep that is an Orange Crested Warbler all right. You can tell because it has no distinguishing marks at all.’ I our eyes it was a “LBB.” That is a little brown bird, or in this case a little greenish yellow brown bird. The leader kept promising us a Cinnamon Teal. Even gave us directions to where to find it. We hopped on the green dragon and galloped right over there. When we arrived we found this cinnamon colored duck like bird running with the blue-winged teals just like we were told. We whipped out our bird book and tried our best to make him into a Cinnamon Teal. Even took his picture at maximum zoom. Back home we used the internet to get all kinds of photos that would give us the positive identification we needed to put him on our list. No go! This “duck” had a stripe on his bill that just didn’t fit the mug shot of a Cinnamon Teal. Suddenly it dawned on me, this “duck” had the beak of a chicken; a Pied-Billed Grebe.
Tired of bird stories, how about a telescope story. We are very casual amateur astronomers also. Our telescope is a typical $100 backyard refractor telescope with a 60 mm objective lens. Brazos Bend State Park boasts the George Observatory. Now the big observatories are mostly on high mountains in remote locations away from people and light pollution. This observatory has three modest sized telescopes. The largest is 36 inches or 900 mm which is 15 times greater diameter than my telescope. However the light gathering power of a telescope varies as the square of the diameter, so the big telescope in reality is 225 times bigger than mine. (Actually not quite true because it has a ten inch hole in its middle but who is counting.) This telescope is unusual in several other points too. First it is open to the public most Saturdays from 3:00 pm to 10:00 pm. For $5 you get a ticket to a viewing time slot with about 15 other people. Second, you actually get to put your eye to an eye-piece and look through the telescope. Today most viewing is done by camera or video. On our watch the telescope was turned toward Rigel, a double star in Orion with a huge blue giant and its companion. The star was so bright it hurt your eyes. The other telescopes were focused on the Nebula in Orion’s sword and on Saturn and its moons. Besides the three domed telescopes local amateurs show up and set up their telescopes and all are willing to show you the skies and talk shop all evening. What a blast!
To round out Saturday evening the Brazos Bend Pickers came by the amphitheater and gave us a two hour Bluegrass show.
If you go to our web site you can see a photo of the Observatory domes and also a photo of an alligator crossing the trail right beside Path, the green dragon.
As always, we are having the times of our lives. We are in La Grange, TX tonight and they are saying scary things on the news. Things like tornado watch. On the bright side, however, it isn’t snowing like it is back in Scappoose this afternoon. “Don’t worry, be happy.”
Gary and Judy
