At the top of the tree part 1.....

Most of last week was spent in Lindale, Texas visiting my sister and her husband.  She has several porches on her house and I spent a lot of time in the mornings watching the bird activity at the top of her Bradford Pear tree near the end of the house while drinking my morning tea.  She was afraid the tree might be dying because it had no leaves at the top, but as you can see in the photos there are lots of buds on the branches.  The birds just love to perch on this tree.  I think I counted at least 13 different species enjoying this tree in the time I was there.

 I discovered that birds in eastern Texas are not a lot different then birds in southern Indiana, but that doesn't stop my enjoyment of them!  I believe these little sparrows are Chipping Sparrows.  They came every day in small groups.

 A pair of them.

 I think this is an Eastern Wood Pewee....not sure.

Not sure if this is another of the Chipping Sparrows or something else.  It got really hard to tell at times.

 I had a lot of help with my bird watching from Buddy......but he thought it all was pretty boring.

Another helper.....I can't remember his name!

 A Goldfinch

 House Finch male......I saw a pair of them on another day.

 A pair of House Sparrows.

 A Junco

 The Mockingbird.....State bird of Texas.  He really felt he ruled this tree and I have more photos of him to post later.

 No idea what this little sparrow is.....maybe a Savannah?  

 More of  the Chipping Sparrows....they were so cute.

 A Wren........seems plainer then my Carolina Wren, but has the white eye stripe.....is it a Bewick's Wren???  Often the birds were so high up, it was hard to photograph the details.

 My absolute favorite bird of the week was the Yellow-rumped Warblers.  I see one on a rare occasion at home, but here they were in this tree off and on all day long!  I had so much fun taking its photo!  I probably shot hundreds of photos of it.  I never realized that warblers would sit there like that.  At first I kept thinking it was some sort of gnat-catcher because it sits just like the pewees and phoebes and such.

One of the few shots I got showing its yellow rump.  It spent most of the time in an upright position near the top of the tree.

I have more tree-top sitters that I will save for tomorrow.  Might as well stretch out these photos for a few days!

Millwood Lake Dam cont.

I'm back home and will try to continue this post that I started a week ago about Millwood Dam.  Blogger seems to be cooperating again.  Maybe it was because I was on the laptop that I was having problems.

There were a few Great Blue Heron around the edges.

I guess this one is checking out the water level.

 Way out in the middle of this huge lake there was a flock of White Pelicans and a lot of what I think are Cormorants.  I wish the photos were sharper and easier to tell, but it was a great distance away (the lake is over 29,000 acres in size).

 I just liked the way this little almost island looked.  The flock of birds is there on the right, disappearing behind this chunk of land.

On the other side of the road there was a road that took you down to the bottom of the dam along the spillway.  Here there were Egrets and Cormorants.  There seemed to be two sizes of the egrets.....some smaller ones were on the rocks.

I don't see a lot of Cormorants, so this was interesting for me to see a bunch of them.

3 egrets......they opened one of the gates of the dam while we were there, which stirred up all the birds and these three ended up sitting here together after things settled back down.

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Enough of this place, but it was a great place to visit!  Arkansas is a lovely state with lots of parks and wildlife areas.  I will have more on that when I get to our return trip.  

We spent most of the week in Lindale, Texas with one of my sisters.  I want to get all this stuff posted while I can remember what and where I saw things.

Lake Catherine and Millwood Lake.....

We stopped at two nice birding spots on the way through Arkansas.  The first was Lake Catherine State Park.

We hiked a trail through this park and the first thing I saw was this Great Blue Heron along the edge of the water.

 One lone Grebe.

 Mike on the swinging bridge

 The waterfall we hiked back to....Falls Creek Falls.

Saw this huge spider web along the way.

 A butterfly we saw......don't have my butterfly book with me.

 Another.....something like a Comma maybe, but I don't see the mark?
(NOTE:  I've been looking in my butterfly book and think this is a Goatweed Leafwing!  Nothing I have seen before.  It was bright orange on the inside when it flew.  Such a change from the outside.)

 The second place we went was Millwood Lake and Dam.  This is a huge lake....29, 200 acres.

The little white speck in the first photo was this egret.  Saw lots of egrets.

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In the middle of doing this post I got another of those annoying message from Blogger about using up all my space even though I shrunk the photos down, so this will have to be a 2 part post....I guess.  Frustrating.



Crossing bridges.....

Today we crossed a lot of bridges and major rivers! 

I won't show photos of all of them, but we crossed the Wabash River into Illinois, then the Mississippi River into Missouri, and also the Arkansas River in Arkansas while going around Little Rock!

In Illinois, we noticed a small lake next to the highway and an eagle was sitting in a tree looking for his lunch.  So we swung off the highway and onto the little road adjacent to the lake to get a photo.  Passed a hawk and a Kestrel on the same road near the lake!  What a busy little place for birds of prey.

 Looking at this, I know that I'm sure not in Indiana any more!  We passed acres and acres of cotton fields!  Wow....being from the "north", I am not used to seeing cotton in the fields instead of corn and soybeans.

 They roll it in big round bales....those yellow wrapped things.....just like hay.

A close-up of the cotton on the plants.  So cool!  I wanted to stop and pick up a handful from the side of the road, but resisted the impulse :-)



The "mighty Mississippi River" seen in passing from the bridge.

Just so you know where we are :-)

 I wish that I had counted all the hawks we saw today....on poles, in trees, on fence posts, flying over-head!  Sometimes they were actually on adjacent poles.  I know we saw 50 or more between Evansville and Little Rock, Arkansas.

 Mostly Red-tails, but I did see some other kinds.  Wish I could have stopped for more photos, but we would never have gotten to Arkansas if I had.

 In Arkansas we were looking for a park to have our lunch and explore, and ended up at the Hampton Archeological Museum State Park.  It is just a small museum and no longer a location for mounds left by the Indians.  They dug up the relics from the mounds years ago and the farmers leveled the mounds and planted them. 

 I took a few photos in the museum.

 They found a lot of nice items.  It is good that they were at least able to excavated the mounds before they were destroyed.  We had mound-building Indians near Evansville, too, and are fortunate that they left the mounds intact there.



Going to try to find some birds tomorrow before heading on to Texas.

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I know I promised more of the quilt signs on buildings, but it will have to wait until I get back home.  The photos are on my desk top computer and I forgot to copy them before I left.