Finally Some Sun!

Sun is always the photographer's friend or enemy.  I know there are folks who say you can get just as great a show without sun as with it, but when the landscape is lush and colors are almost so rich they are fake, nothing does this justice like the sun. 

So I should have known that our sunset/night tour was going to turn out well because at the very start I got this great shot of the resident chamber-of-commerce egret on the wharf before we even started.  To be fair, this Great Egret has a clear draw because the local fishermen come in and clean their fish at the dock and there are lots of tasties for a very aware egret to munch on.  So he's very cannily skulking around to get the goodies from two fishermen working on their catch.  It was a great start.  

We start out and first of all, we have lots of sun - thank heavens.  The lake is not only up, but up a lot because of all the rain, and even a couple of nights ago they had another 2½" of rain in one night.  Rain means clouds, and that means no sun!!!!  But tonite we have sun!

Right away things look up.  There's a couple of osprey nests on the lake and we trek close to one and there they are - a couple working the nest.  This one has a nice tastie and probably getting a little snack before he heads back to the nest with some goodies for the kids!

They really are elegant creatures and these ospreys are very large.  The ones we see in Yellowstone are a bit smaller because of the climate, but these are a lot larger and a little more skittish, but we manage to get closer.  

This guy was obviously trying to draw us away from the nest, and we followed.  Either that or he was protecting his tastie from us.  I wanted to tell him he could have it if he would simply sit still for a quickie portrait....maybe with the dog - maybe not.  I'm not sure Bruno would be that accommodating (barking and all might be a bit disconcerting for the osprey!)

This is the nest and mom finally gave flight with a beautiful wingspan.  Unfortunately, I didn't get any great shots of that fabulous wingspan to show how really large these birds are.    Oh well, something to work for next time around!

We took a canoe ride earlier in the day even with clouds the landscape is totally lush.  All these photos are larger and you can see them when you click on them individually.  I can only imagine what this will look like this summer when the trees are in "full bloom"!

As we ended our ride we got some fabulous shots of the sunset.  One of the great things of nature is how it blends opposite colors of the color wheel (yes, it's another art lesson from Claire), without the colors getting muddy.  Notoriously when you do that with paints - no matter what medium, the colors get muddy, but not in nature.  They simply compliment each other beautifully!  Here the turquoise of the sky and the orange of the setting sun set each other off gloriously.

Match the complimentary colors (without mud) with the silhouette of a cypress or two, and It's a Painting!

Caddo Lake Texas

Walt's first video this morning and it was verrrrry coooooold, but beautiful.

An Unusual World

We're in east Texas in the middle of the world's largest cypress forest.  Yep, there is such a thing as a cypress forest and it's in the middle of a lake.  Here's the baffling part.....when you look at a map of this lake like this:

So you think this is a pretty good-sized lake and it covers a lot of space and this will be fun to be on a lake this large and the lakescapes should be really neat.

Then you look at this map and think - whoa what there a drought I missed here?....didn't these folks talk about lots of rain in this area?  What in the world happened?

When one overlays the other it shows that almost half of the lake is missing or looks like half of the water is missing.  

But here shows what's really going on.  

All those green dots in there represent the forest.  Cypress don't grow on land, but they can't seed in the water.  That means that they had to seed on land and then grow in the water, so the water had to appear after the tree was seeded.  That answers the question why cypress trees last so long.  Some are even 400 years old.

This lake has a very active history and is the result of some very dramatic earthquakes, oil finds, and finally, conservationist have kept the area as much as possible as it was created.  The lake today looks very much like a fairyland as many of the explorers must have thought when they came upon the lake.

This is Caddo Lake in east Texas.  A few photos from a trip this morning.

As the lake became navigatable with riverboats hauling produce up and down the river, the lake had a path cut through it, and it really does look like the entrance to some huge plantation with rows of cypress on each side.

The sun setting gave us great light on this trip

And the sunset on the lake didn't hurt either

More interesting shots from Walt with the light from the sunset

Some of these scenes look so beautiful that they are almost unreal.  This was from this morning during a paddle boat ride we took, with Walt and me offering the paddling.  Needless to say that paddling a canoe is a team sport, not one in which either member are telling the other what to do!  We both need some paddling lessons.  Tomorrow we're taking a motorboat to save any more arguing about where to go and what to do!