By Karen Gleason
I arrived at the Sonic Drive-in along the San Felipe Creek Saturday just as the trailing edge of a line of rain showers passed over the city.
The rain had started while I was still in my apartment’s second-floor studio, writing my morning journal entry. I start every day in my studio, savoring a cup of strong black coffee in my favorite mug, handmade by a Minnesota potter, and setting the day’s first thoughts on paper.
I nearly always open one of the east-facing windows while I write. I love being awake during the velvety silence before dawn and watching and listening as the world awakens around me.
For the next few weeks, I will be visiting several different public areas along the creek, and on Saturday I began by driving to the little city park just upstream of the Highway 90 Bridge.
I parked on the north edge of the Sonic parking lot and walked the short distance to the creek.
All around me I could hear the trilling songs of Red-winged Blackbirds and the shrieking whistles of Great-tailed Grackles as they staked out territories along the creek.
The morning sun peeked out from behind cottony gray clouds, and I took a seat at the edge of the water and waited to see what would present itself.
On the far bank, I watched a male Green Kingfisher perched on a large boulder in the creek and saw him dive into the water like a feathered missile several times, at last coming up with a small struggling silver fish.
Farther upstream, a handful of Neotropic Cormorants, also fishers, still slept, heads tucked under their wings.
Neotropic Cormorants are the smaller of the two cormorant species we see along the creek. The larger Double-crested Cormorant is more common and more widespread across the U.S. generally.
Neotropic Cormorants are found in the U.S., mostly in Texas, and usually more along smaller bodies of water than their Double-crested cousins.
Other water birds were present on the creek as well, including several pairs of Pied-billed Grebes and a lone male Lesser Scaup, a type of diving duck.
Grebes aren’t ducks, but they do float around on the creek, often diving beneath its surface to grab a big freshwater crayfish.
Grebes live along the creek all year long, but the scaup will be leaving us soon for its breeding grounds on the lakes of Canada.
Lesser Scaups and Ring-billed Ducks are common on our creek during the winter months, but most of them have gone by now.
