Sunday, August 7, 2011

I walked to 8 am Mass to beat the heat and saw some sights along the way. Yesterday I walked by this electrical tower and thought that all the big dark feathers on the ground looked like the turkey buzzard feathers we find at my parents cabin, but I could not find a buzzard or nest. This morning, before the thermals kicked into high gear, it was a very different story. Maybe that's why when I found my first armadillo (flattened) a little later there was not much left. I walked on the bridge above the creek pool shown in yesterday's picture and it was full of decent-sized turtles. Mass was OK; I continue to be impressed with the diversity there, but today's priest's thick Asian accent was hard to follow. On the way home I took a long detour through the Walnut Creek park again. More fossils, but I also got a better feel for the scope of the park. It has a good number of trails and looks sort of wild and you can get a little lost if you are not careful, but you are really not too terribly far from civilization. I'm looking forward to more exploration with the family. I bailed out again at about 10:30, that's about as far as willing as I am to go in the heat at this time. I walked outside to a late lunch this afternoon, but spend most of the rest of the time indoors (for now - I get a little cabin feverish). I'm not sure if today's high will quite cross 100 today (really close), making it the coldest day since I arrived (could have fooled me). If I am reading the data correctly, last week had 4 daily high temperature records broken. People continue to pray for rain. This squirrel was trying to keep cool on the steps just outside my apartment door.

One week

Arrived in Austin a week ago. While Karen, Kris, and Katie and a bunch of friends and relatives busted their backsides to load the truck in Peoria, I was sort of twiddling my thumbs. This morning I made my way to Walnut Creek (different spot this time) to do more fossil hunting. More shells - the good news is that I'm not taking every one I see. I met some people doing water quality tests as part of the Colorado River (the one in Texas that goes through Austin) watershed monitoring. That data can be found at: http://crwn.lcra.org/. I found some dried waterfalls that are probably pretty when it rains. That's not cement on the falls, those are natural tufa deposits. Despite the drought I saw fish, a lizard (skink?) and tiny toads no bigger than my fingernail. No mosquitoes. At lunchtime I went out again to explore a shopping area. Visiting Harbor Freight when you live in a apartment is kind of like being in a candy store with no money. The rest of the day I puttered around the apartment - I did come up with a half-baked research idea, probably for when I get back to Bradley. Tonight I watched "Terminator Salvation", a good movie to not torture the wife and kids with.

The bats (still more wildlife)

As you might know Austin has a world-famous urban population of Mexican free-tailed bats. About 1.5 million of them live in vertical joints under the Congress Avenue bridge. It is a big deal to go watch them take off for their evening flight. Since the UT campus was a mere 25-ish blocks away, I caught the bus after work to the bridge area. There is a big park along either side of the river, and I walked a small portion of the hot and dusty trail with lots of other pedestrians. I found the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue and a few gems I did not know about. The picture with the Congress Avenue bridge in the background is viewed through a foreground of cypress "knees" and one of the ever-present grackles. As I said, the bat viewing is a big deal around here, with vendors to sell you beverages and boat rides available under the bridge (I actually heard that was pretty cool, but I will wait until my family arrives for that). Sitting on the grassy hill to watch is free! When I walked under bridge beforehand I could smell something musty-pungent(not real strong) and hear faint, high-pitched squeaks. I thought it was interesting to see a fair number of pigeons using the beams under the bridge - day shift vs. night shift I suppose. The first bats started flittering around at about 8:05 pm, then the population began moving in earnest at about 8:10 pm. The cloud of bats was not as thick as I expected, but it was neat to see this sort of streamer of bats twisting and turning into the distance over the river - hard to capture that with a camera. I, along with a lot of other people, got the general idea and did not wait to see the end. When I rode by on the bus at 8:45 there were still people on the bridge, but it was too dark to tell if there were still any bats coming out. I'm attaching video clips as well as pictures (sorry they are so grainy).

More wildlife

Finally caught the bus at seven-ish this morning, not long after the sun rose. At lunch I found a little stream to sit near. The bluegills it contained were ravenously hungry, but liked bread crust way more than orange peel. Some sort of water bird showed up (perhaps a bittern?) and began hunting minnows and had a little standoff with a squirrel - fun to watch. Tonight was a venture into the world of coin-operated laundry, where you fight for machines, the clothes don't come out completely dry and you wonder just how clean they got. Fortunately I have a porch rail and it is still over 90 outside - are there is a nice breeze.

Interactions with Austin "wildlife"

I took a quick lunch outside on a UT bench today. I fed a grackle (that is what those birds are what I posted about on the July 31 entry), then eventually was visited by about ten of them, plus a couple blue jays and cute little squirrel that would have probably jumped in my lunch bag if I had not given it chips to keep it busy. Apparently not everybody likes the grackles, see: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1582197,00.html. Tonight I went for a walk and found that the grocery store was not as far away as I thought - I'm very happy about that. On the walk I saw (and to my surprise caught) a tiny gecko. The picture is of it sitting briefly on my index finger. I could not keep it - I had no clue what to feed something that little.

Settling in

The sun rises noticably later here in the "west"(6:49 am today) than in Peoria (5:55 am). It also sets later here (8:24 vs 8:12), and, for now, Peoria's days are longer. Found an Inoceramus fossil shell (common clam shell from the Cretaceous era) just outside my apartment door this morning - how cool is that! Turned in the rental car and caught the bus to campus (its free to faculty, staff, and students). Battled through IT bureaucracy for a good portion of the day, but actually did some reading, too. Tonight on the way home I got cocky and did not have my street map out. The bus took an unexpected turn that I did not recognize from Sunday; I panicked and thought I overshot my stop somehow. Immediately got off the bus to minimize the damage, dug out the map to find that the bus had diverted to Austin Community College (apparently does not do that on Sundays) BEFORE my stop, and wound up walking 3/4 mile to the apartment. Ah well. Cooked my first meal in the apartment - mac and cheese and mixed veggies and tuna all mixed together. The pic is of a turtle in a pond near the clock tower.

A first day

Today was my first day as an employee at UT. Things went OK - lots of good things to do and learn. Coincidentally today is also the 45th anniversary of the infamous clock tower shootings at UT, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman. Today I also moved into our Austin apartment and have added some groceries (the rental car goes back tomorrow) and hooked up the internet. Not much time to take or process pix, so I will add a few plant pix I shot at UT. One is of prickly pear cacti. I saw some growing wild in some fields tonight, too. Illinois has prickly pear cacti in some areas, like at Sand Ridge, but cacti seem like more of a Texas thing. Another pic is of "live oaks". Pretty trees, and they appear to support some pockets of epiphyte growth - maybe Spanish moss? Other pix are of a lotus garden near the clock tower.