Though both my husband and I lived in Texas at various points in our lives, neither of us had spent much time in Fort Worth. This month, we both spent most of a week there, held captive brought there by a conference at the Hotel Texas. The hotel, now a Hilton, is famous for being the last overnight stop for JFK and his wife before his assassination in Dallas.
During the lunch hour, we were able to stroll around the city’s downtown. Walking back to the hotel, we did a double take. Were those really trumpets hanging out over the street? Indeed they were! There were two 48-foot-tall angels carved into the facade — marking in no uncertain terms, the location of the city’s Bass Performance Hall.
No doubt about it. Texans do things big.
Trumpets blaring – two angels flank the facade of the Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas.
Cardinals have been a family favorite bird. In the northeastern U.S., they brighten up a winter landscape like no other.
UNWELCOME FINDING -- The cardinal has a large lump on his right shoulder.
This morning, our local cardinal and his mate were whooshing through the small pines at the back of the house. Himself decided to take a commanding spot in a leafless tree.
Grabbed the camera between fixing Sunday morning espresso and popovers and fired away through the kitchen window.
FROM BEHIND -- The hump was more visible when he turned north.
In unloading the shots to the laptop, noticed something alarming about the bird — he appears to have a hump of some sort on his right shoulder. At first it appeared that he was just balling up, as birds do, against the cold. But on closer examination, the hump is very distinct and stands out no matter how he carries himself. Fortunately, the growth doesn’t appear to impair his ability to fly or do other cardinal things.
On a somewhat lighter note, in going through the Peterson Field Guide to Birds, there was an interesting fellow included in the pages for “Cardinals, Buntings, and Allies,” called Pyrrhuloxia. What he looks like is a cardinal that’s gone through a bleach bath. It reminded me of a photo that colleague Donna shot back in the spring of 2010. Too grayish to be a female cardinal. What she did shoot appears to be this Pyrrhuloxia — quite a bit east of its normal range which appears to be SW Texas, New Mexico and Mexico, with the occasional wandering as far north as the Texas Panhandle.
When moisture from the warm Gulf of Mexico meets cold air from the north and west, severe thunderstorms are likely. Sometimes, they give birth to tornadoes. One such storm cropped up mid-afternoon today. Here on Round Mountain, we had a front row seat as the wall cloud moved eastward, pelting us with pea-sized hail and cracking the sky with frequent lightning.
The National Weather Service is still receiving damage reports. Some 15,000 people are reported without power, with trees down, one car overturned with children inside (the children were rescued and reported to be OK, but probably scared out of their wits), and damage to buildings downtown.
The rain-free area to the left precedes what was turning into a wall cloud (dark area to the right) that produced a tornado that tracked some 15 miles through Little Rock on Oct. 24.A stroke of lightning bolts through the sky as the storm intensifies. Spectacular sunset between storms, as we await a second storm system that has already produced a tornado in SW Arkansas.Red boxes for tornado warnings and yellow boxes for severe thunderstorms track like footprints across Texas and Arkansas.
The (Urban-Wildlife) Interface 