Vicksburg to Home

   We woke up in Vicksburg. It was cool and overcast. It looked like it were about to rain. Berry and I ate breakfast inside the hotel. Robert listened to the BBC News broadcast. It was time to head back to Memphis, to gather our belongings and load up the car and get on the road. We wanted to bird several places on the way back to Memphis, but it was time to get on the road.

   We traveled along the road closest to the Mississippi River, peeking into bogs and brambles, and studying flooded fields and flooded drainage canals. The birds were all over the place. We could not stop identifying and counting and scribbling and researching. The morning flew by and our list grew in length. The road beside the river soon led to the top of the levee, where it turned from a paved asphault arrangement to a gravel road. The chances of rain meant that the condition of the road ahead mattered. My little car was great on the expressway, not so good in the mud.

   We were driving along the top of the levee, when suddenly Berry tells me to stop the car. "Stop, stop, stop," she said. That was the signal for me to stop the car and also grab my binoculars. Berry had spotted a Barred Owl (Strix Varia) in a tree beside the levee. Berry has amazing eyes and invaluable eyes for our birding adventures. She claimed that she thought it might have been either a nest of a clump of leaves, and here it was a Barred Owl (Strix Varia), staring back at us.

   One of our favorite places to bird was the corner of a flooded field. Full on swamps are difficult to approach in my little car, they are full of alligators and the wading birds do not forage inside a swamp with a lot of water. We parked on the side of the road and gazed at the corner of that flooded field with our binoculars. There were Snowy Egrets (Name) with their golden shoes. There were Lesser Yellow legs (Name) with their yellow legs. We saw lots of Willetts (Name) which seemed more polite than the other birds. The Great Egrets (Name) were taller than any other bird in the corner. The Little Blue Herons (Name) came in two colors. Blue for adults and white for juveniles. This was our best birding spot of the day. We called it our "Honey Pot."

Here is a list of all the birds we saw today.

• Red Winged Blackbird
• Black Vulture
• Great Egret
• Little Blue Heron
• Northern Shoveler
• Tree Swallow
• Northern Cardinal
• Willett
• Lesser Yellow Legs
• Snowy Egret
• Blue Winged Teal
• Great Blue Heron
• Indigo Bunting
• Black Necked Stilt
• Killdeer
• Boat Tailed Grackle
• Brown Headed Cowbird
• Purple Martin
• Barred Owl
• Cattle Egret
• Loggerhead Shrike
• Red Tailed Hawk

   Home in the pouring rain. We unloaded the car. Berry went to pick up Cosmo from the kennel, and we all decided to take a nap.

Robert and Berry

Photos courtesy of wikipedia, pburian