A New Site

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Dee and decided to take advantage of the good weather to drive over to a site we've never visited before, the Texas City Dike. It would also be a good opportunity to try out my new zoom lens.

When we arrived in Texas City, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the area was not the mass of oil refineries and other industrial buildings that we were expecting. In fact the road to the dike went through some attractive farmland. The view at the dike itself was also much better than we expected, although part of the shoreline was taken up with refinery buildings.

  
Both sides of the 5 mile-long dike had Double-crested Cormorants, Forster's Terns and three types of Gulls: Laughing, Ring-billed and Herring.

 

 
There were also plenty of both Brown and White Pelicans, always fun to watch. 

 
The right hand side had the first Buffleheads and Common Goldeneyes that we've seen for a while.

 Buffleheads

It also had half-a-dozen Common Loons.

The only songbird we noticed was a solitary Savannah Sparrow, seeming oddly out-of-place two miles from the shore.

Just before the end of our visit, we pulled into a parking area to watch a Snowy Egret and a Great Blue Heron and wound up watching a pair of American Oystercatchers instead.

There was a coldish wind blowing across the water, so we decided to drive along the levee to have our picnic lunch in the Texas City Bay Park, only a little north of the dike entrance. As you'll see from my next post, the park was certainly worth visiting.    

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