Nutria

This creature came out from under the boardwalk right as I was walking over it. It looks like a very large rat, and has the thin rounded tail of one, so according to Wikipedia, that makes it a nutria. This was the best shot I could get.

Flock of birds on the water

It's been a while since the birds have been near the pier. They've all been on a different line of rocks lately. Today they were all out on the water right in front of me. It's mostly gulls with some pelicans.

The closest that any pelicans have been in a while to a place I can take pics from.

The Invertebrate Trail

One of the older displays on the boardwalk is a series of posts with engravings of invertebrates.

The sign has seen better days. It says that students can make rubbings of the engravings.

Here they are in order from last to first. The one that amuses me the most is Hallucigenia (farthest from the sign).

A big white boat and a fire

The Stacy Jo is a less frequent visitor of the dock area where the MS Joy and Gulf Glory park. Here it is headed out.

Also, there was some sort of big fire going on across the bay today.

The line of smoke goes all the way across the sky to the other side (you can also see it behind the Stacy Jo above).

Gone to fuzz

The flowers next to the pier have gone all fuzzy (compared to a couple weeks ago).

For that matter, so have the frilly Spartina tops. About half of them are now fuzzy instead of frilly.

Two Big Boats

There are two of these black cargo ships that go in and out of the docking area next to the ferry landing. Here's the Gulf Glory heading out.

And here's the MS Joy heading in.

One of these days I'll get a clearer shot of the MS Joy. So far the timing hasn't been in my favor.

New Estuarium Display in Progress

They were in the middle of building this gazebo when I first started taking walks over the summer (before I started taking pictures). It was just an empty gazebo for a while, and then they put in a blue-tarp-covered thing with a sign saying "coming soon!" on the front.

That's how it looked for the next two months.

Then last week, a ladder appeared. And a few days after that, some new educational signs.

Today the blue tarp is gone, and there's water running down the back wall thing into a bowl filled with oyster shells.

It's going to be a new display about watersheds and estuaries. I'll get closeup shots when they've figured out how to hide all the wires. :)

A Heron in the Wind

It was very, very windy today. Here's a great blue heron standing around facing into the wind.

Here it is again, bigger. :)

A weird new structure in the bay

Something must've been going on in Natural Gas World today. That thing with the three posts is new.

In other news, some ducks that I couldn't get a good shot of. There were 4-5 of them.

A Red Spartina-like Plant

It's raining cats and dogs today, so here's a picture of a plant from earlier this week. It looks a lot like Spartina, but it's red, and the seeding part at the top looks very different.

Here's a shot of the frilly bit at the top of a regular Spartina. The picture is from a couple weeks ago, but they still all look like that.

Return of the purple flower

That purple flower from earlier had disappeared by the next day, but now it's suddenly back. Or maybe it's a different one in the same place. There do seem to be a bunch of other buds under it.

Meanwhile, I still don't know what this is. I just find it fascinating.

An actual songbird

This might be the only time I ever get a decent picture of a passerine. It's sitting at the top of the barbed-wire fence for the Coast Guard station next to the boardwalk.

In unpictured bird news, there's been some kind of diving duck hanging around. You can tell it's a diving duck because most of its body is below the water surface when it's sitting "on" the surface.

Also, a fishing boat going out for a really late start. They usually leave early in the morning, not at noon.

A sand dune with cactus

The big sand dune between the parking lot and most of the boardwalk. The estuarium is the blue building in the background. Unlike for most beach dunes that have much less plant cover, the sand of this dune isn't going anywhere.

There are lots of these cactus growing on the dune in big clumps.

Some field ecology in progress

Today a DISL student was out doing some field ecology at the edge of the marsh. The white square she's holding is made of PVC pipe and used to mark sampling quadrats. It's one of ecology's simplest and most common tools.

A flower and a boat

Today was a great day for unpicturable wildlife, including dolphins, ducks, and some other dark flying shorebird that I didn't recognize. So instead, here's another flower.

Little purple flowers tend to be here-today, gone-tomorrow along the boardwalk. I happened to notice this one as I was going by.

Meanwhile, the MS Joy was going out as I was going in. It's cruising right through where the dolphins were.

More butterflies

Here's my best shot of a monarch butterfly so far. There are starting to be more of them now.

Meanwhile, there are lots more of these other orange butterflies, the gulf fritillary.







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Edit: due to technical difficulties, this post was accidentally deleted and had to be reconstructed. Below was the comment on the original post.

cruinne Nov 5, 2014, 4:10:00 PM

Nice to see some of the monarchs making it down to the gulf coast for their vacation.

Fuzzy white flowers

While the peas by the pier were dying, these bushes next to them were getting ready to flower. Here's what they looked like a couple weeks ago:

And here's what they look like now. I think this must be max bloom for these things.

A Fishing(?) Boat

This is the smallest shrimp trawler I've ever seen (if that's what it's supposed to be).

It looks sort of like someone installed nets all over a recreational vessel to try to turn it into a fishing vessel. It's kind of adorable.