A Day at Huntington Beach State Park!

 Well I had the whole blog almost completed and managed to delete the whole thing with one misstep!  I will try again!!

We headed to a different outlook than we normally do and were greeted with a trio of Roseate Spoonbills.  We hadn't seen one on our last trips.  Two of them were asleep most of the time but this one finally woke up to eat!

I liked this one as it shows his bill so well!

Lisa spotted this dull brown bird off in the distance behind a Great Blue Heron.  I am pretty sure it is a Clapper Rail.  He was darting in and out of the reeds.

This is the aforementioned Great Blue Heron taking off

I saw this Anhinga which surprised me as I have only seen them in fresh water areas.

Spreading his wings!

Just for comparison, this is a not very good picture of two Cormorants.  You can easily see the difference in the beaks here.

We saw lots and lots of both Great Egrets like this one and Snowy Egrets.

There were actually more Snowy Egrets than the Great Egrets which was a change!

There were even a few Ibis foraging on the shore.  They are like pigeons down here after a heavy rain and frequent visitors in the winter.

I believe this is a Semi-palmated Sandpiper.

I believe this is a Western Sandpiper.  He and his friend were very small.

I believe this is a Willet, which are common along the beach down here.

There was a huge flock of Wood Storks way off in the distance.  This is a very cropped picture.

This is still cropped but not as much

All in all, it was a great day at the park!

Huntington Beach State Park and Three More Tops Finished

This is one of two quilts I made from what I considered some pretty ugly fabric.  I almost prefer this type of fabric for stack and whacks as it can't get worse and usually is better.  I am not sure this was true for this one!  It is okay but not my favorite for sure!  As usual, I did two different sets!

This is the second one.

This is the ugly fabric.  It had a 24 inch repeat though!  Still have a bit left which I will incorporate into the backs.  I obviously bought it to do hexagons but didn't think it was worth the extra work of hexagons these last few days.

I have bags and bags of finished squares that I made during my time with leg in cast and before I left for Rochester in the spring.  This was one of those bags which didn't have that many squares.  These were probably leftovers from a previous project but I found an arrangement that used all of them and some hand dyed pale yellow fabric for the set.

I gave 15 tops to a friend who has a long arm and is the leader of the charity quilt group.  I managed to find backings for all of them as well so she will be kept busy quilting for awhile!  I feel guilty giving her three more this soon after giving her all the others!

My daughter and I took our annual pilgrimage to Huntington Beach State Park last week shortly after I got down here.  It was high tide so we mostly saw egrets and more egrets with an occasional siting of others.  Before we left we spotted our Wood Storks in their arboreal retreat and Lisa ran back and got some good pictures of them and the one Roseate Spoonbill that had joined them.  This is the one Anhinga we saw which surprised me as it is a salt water marsh and I usually see them in fresh water areas.  He posed for us though!

This was one pudgy great egret!!  He was chasing everyone away and my daughter got a great picture of him in flight!  I thought he was a swan when I first spotted him (or her).

This was a Little Blue Heron that I spotted off in the distance and was amazed that I got a decent picture of him.

This is a very handsome Osprey!
 

Catching Up!

This is truly a miscellaneous blog with bits of what I have done during the past month.  This is a late afternoon picture looking over the Cape Fear River with lots of color in the sky.  

My biggest accompishment has been the basting, machine quilting and binding of 18 quilts!  9 of those were for the Neonatal unit at our local hospital, 3 are for Habitat for Humanity and the rest will go to the Sweet Charity group except for one which I will send to a cousin.  

My oldest daughter and I made our annual pilgrimage to Huntington Beach State Park down in S. Carolina but we were a little late this year and there were a lot of people as it was the weekend.  We didn't see too many birds but did spot our Wood Storks all off in a tree  This was a nice Great Egret and there were many of those.

We also spotted several Semi-palmated Plovers. 

They were joined by several Semi-palmated Sandpipers.

I took a drive around Greenfield Lake here in Wilmington a couple of weeks ago and the leaves are just beginning to turn there.

A very late afternoon trip down to the Air Force housing produced quite a herd of deer who didn't seem to care that they had visitors!

I also added to the quilts I had made this summer with these two baby quilts made from fabrics I had previously cut up.

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I have had this piece of Michael Miller fabric for years.  There were two yards and a total of 3 repeats in the length.  I have stared at it the last couple of years wondering what to do with it and finally decided to do a stack and whack even though I didn't have the repeats lengthwise.  There was a partial repeat across the fabric so I used that and decided to do a "posy" stack and whack .

I finally decided to use a full panel and surround it with the posies so that I would get to see the full panel which I really liked a lot -- the reason I couldn't just give this fabric away.  My plan at present is to surround the panel with a two inch green border and then surround the posies with varying shades of green and yellow.  Looking at the picture now, I am thinking some white might make its way in somewhere..  Currently the panel is 24 inches high and 26 inches wide and each of the little posies is 5 1/2 inches.  I will be using my hand dyed "solids" for the borders.  I may rearrange the posy blocks a bit as well.  We shall see how it develops.  My quilts generally tell me what to do not the reverse!

On the bottom is the green I am thinking will be a good border.

These three fabrics will surround the little posies (I think!).  They look better in person.

Huntington Beach State Park Visit

I wanted to get down to Huntington Beach State Park down just south of Myrtle Beach in South Carolina early so that I could get to see the Roseate Spoonbills which can be found there in the summer.  I also wanted to see the Wood Storks which I thought were summer birds but a local birder told me they stay all winter in great numbers.  I must say that I have seen these huge birds in Florida but not in the numbers I saw in the park!

I was hoping to see some good birds as I took my oldest daughter down with me who hadn't seen some of these birds and likes "big" things to photograph!!  She was not disappointed.  Our timing was perfect as we got there at low tide and the weather was gorgeous -- couldn't have been better.  The light was also coming from the right direction!!  

The park has two main areas where you can park and see the birds -- the first is close to the entrance, you park your car and then walk along the road.  Lisa first spotted a Roseate Spoonbill and a Great 
Blue Heron hanging out together.  I saw Wood Storks off in the distance landing in the reeds at the far end of the walk.

Off in the way distance, I saw a tree filled with white birds.  First I thought Ibis and then Egrets.  Both were wrong -- it was a tree full of these Wood Storks!!

I had seen the flock fly overhead.  A fellow birder commented that there were about 150 that morning.  We saw probably 30 eventually as they came out of hiding and came down toward the marsh by the road.

Here are a couple of the Wood Storks, up close and personal! 

They aren't all that pretty just standing there but are very impressive in flight.

 You can't see the black on the wing tips in this picture very well.

Coming down or a landing!!

This Roseate Spoonbill was one of the first birds we spotted and he finally posed although he spent a good deal of time weaving his bill back and forth in the shallow water feeding.  He was a lovely pink!

He was quite close as you can see!

There were several of these Tri-Color Herons feeding in the reeds.  There were also several Great Blue Herons,

There were lots of Snowy Egrets as well.  These two posed for me on the railing.

There were even more Great Egrets than Snowy Egrets -- magnificent bird!

Then a mature Bald Eagle flew overhead!  I also saw an immature one but didn't get a picture.

No chance of mis-identifying this bird!!

A fellow birder noted that there was a Bald Eagle in a tree on the way to the Marsh Walk (our second venue).  Lisa spotted him up in the tree but then he decided to go to a different branch which wasn't sturdy enough to hold him well so he struggled and finally flew away. 

We walked along the Marsh Walk and really didn't see much except some Black Bellied Plovers and Sanderlings in the mud.  This Black Bellied Plover came up on the railing and posed nicely for me!

After about two hours and 300 pictures for me, we headed back home.  On the way back, we looked over our first birding spot and there were literally no birds except the Wood Storks up in the trees.  Amazing the difference a few minutes can make in seeing birds!

Another birder told me that there have been about a dozen Roseate Spoonbills but that they are heading out soon.  All in all, it was a very successful day.  I wanted to show Lisa the Roseates and the Wood Storks and she was duly impressed!