Bronzed Cowbird Landing on a Branch That Has a Female Brown-Headed Cowbird on It

Here is the first blog of my recent trip to Texas. First thing that happened is that my laptop developed the blue screen of death and I tried to reload Windows. The computer said I must restart the computer. In order to do what I wanted to do, however, when I did that all I got was beeping on the computer and it would not start. I had my grandson take it into work, where he asked the computer techs to try to fix it, but they could not get it started. So for the trip I took my grandson's laptop, which was an old one, and had XP on it, and I know I could not put Lightroom 5 on the the computer. I could download pictures onto my two external drives, that way I would have three copies of the pictures are I would be taking, two external drives, plus the cards.

Now on for the trip, we left Boston right on time and had a decent flight to Dallas. Over Dallas, we started descending and then started back up and kept circling. Because of bad weather in Dallas, everything was backed up. Finally, the pilot told us that we were going to divert to a nearby airport in order to get gas, but, as we were descending, at the last moment, we were able to land at Dallas. We were told not to worry about connecting flights, since everything was delayed. I went to my gate for the next flight and of course told it was delayed. We were supposed to leave at 1 PM, however, with the delays and some gate changes. We finally left at 6 PM, meaning that I finally got to my hotel at 8 PM. Checking in and going to my room, which was upgraded to a small suite I unpacked and got everything ready for the morning when we were to make at 6 AM to travel out to the ranch.

In the morning I met my group and our leader, Larry Ditto and we traveled out to the ranch, where we stopped at our first blind. "The Bulldog". The group entered the blind and started setting up our equipment, while Larry set up perches and flowers. The blind was below the ground level and overlooked a small pond. The trees in the background were far enough away so that made for a nice clean green backgrounds. We photographed from about 7 AM to 11 AM, then return back into town for lunch and rest and left again at 3 PM, where we photographed until it got too dark to photograph and there were thunderstorms brewing.

Today it took me almost all day to download my pictures and keyword them to make them easy to find. I also deleted the most obvious bad pictures. I am just putting a brief sample of photographs in today's blog. There are a lot more to come.