The largest North American heron, with a head-to-tail length of 91–140 cm (36-55 in), a wingspan of 167-201 cm (66-79 in), and a weight of 2–3.6 kg (4.4-8 lbs), it is blue-gray overall, with black flight feathers, red-brown thighs, and a paired red-brown and black stripe up the flanks; the neck is rusty-gray, with black and white streaking down the front; the head is paler, with a nearly white face, and a pair of black plumes running from just above the eye to the back of the head. The feathers on the lower neck are long and plume-like; it also has plumes on the lower back at the start of the breeding season. The bill is dull yellowish, becoming orange briefly at the start of the breeding season, and the lower legs gray, also becoming orangey at the start of the breeding season. Immature birds are duller in color, with a dull blackish-gray crown, and the flank pattern only weakly defined; they have no plumes, and the bill is dull gray-yellow.

This was the heron I got a picture of yesterday morning.  That is a big fish he got and he is handling it like he is going to bring it some where else to eat it.  I got 4 shots of this giant before he decided he had to let go of the fish in order to escape my camera.  He was very aware of my presence and did not want to leave the fish behind.  He finally dropped it and walked away very rapidly.  He watched me for quite a while and when I got far enough away he went back to snag the flopping fish.  I left him alone at that point.

Everyday that I go out I know I am going to get some unique picture.  I just don’t know what it is going to be until it appears in front of me.  It is like gambling and suddenly hitting the jackpot.  I get an immediate rush when I see the target.  This was a great rush!  This was an absolute giant of a bird.  After getting that bird I rode another few miles in a high…I then decided to focus on flowers and shot about 18 varieties of flowers. (go to my album to see them)  My high lasted almost all day.  I went out again at 6 pm until 8 pm but did not expect to capture much and did not.  I was out for the exercise. 

It was 120 degrees in the sun and 99 in the shade and it did not bother me.  Sometimes I can just handle that heat and ride for many miles and other days it tears me up right away.  Yesterday I had no problem with the intense heat but I stopped every mile or so and drank a lot of water.

While I put up an antenna on the house 12 was playing and got her foot in a mess of fire ants.  Her foot is still swollen and we put lots of drug store stuff on it to fix her.  Her mother will give her a Benadryl before she goes to bed.  I gave her one and she slept for 2 hours.

I got one of those boxes people are supposed to use if they don’t have cable TV.  I went to Sam's and got a good antenna after trying a cheapie rabbit ears one.  Now with my over the air antenna I get about 50 channels.  I did this because when we have storms the cable goes out and sometimes for days at a time.  Of course if there is another hurricane the cable will be out for weeks or months.  So I have a little TV that can be recharged by the sun and we can just hook it up to the antenna and have news.  I set up a switch box at the antenna in line and can switch all the TV’s from Cable to the antenna.   Just flip the switch and you have digital TV.  I mean 50 perfect clean channels of TV.  It sounds better than it is.  12 of the channels are in Spanish, 14 are church stuff, 8 are selling stuff all day long, 3 are weather all day long, 4 are cartoons all day long, and the 11 of them are regular channels.  There is one channel that is movies all day long and all night long.  I sat and watched a couple of OLD movies today and really liked them.  Not bad at all for free…

If I wake up in time I will get the sunrise tomorrow.  Two days now I missed Grandfather Sun and I better get back out there on time. 

Update:  I overslept again.  At 11 twelve and her best friend came over.  They were starving to death.  12’s mother made fish for dinner and they would not eat it.  I also would not eat over there.  When my daughter’s boyfriend is done putting all those Mexican spices on everything you cannot tell what you are eating.  Still this morning their house totally smells like garlic.  So I again made dinner during the night and got all the kids from over there to eat.  They were all grateful.  She and her boyfriend live for themselves….  So I am going out right now since the sun is not shining.  It will overcome the clouds shortly but I need to get out and back in 2 hours so I don’t cook.

Have a great day everyone…

Living along the coast post Ike I have learned a lot about tent cities. Our tent city is now gone. It got really big. A few months ago people started just building their own small shelters on their property while they continued to try to get FEMA and Texas Windstorm help in rebuilding their homes. We got proportionally a fraction of the help that Katrina people got and it was because we were in neighborhoods that were not totally poverty stricken. About 1/3 of the structures are now rebuilt and some are still looking the exact same as they looked the day Ike hit. We now have shanties that people live in.

People decided it was safer to hide out on their own property rather than live in tent cities. For a while they were getting FEMA trailers but the city of Seabrook (the 2^nd hardest IKE hit area with Galveston being the worst)Seabrook decided it was an eyesore so they then passed some rules saying that the FEMA trailers could not be in Seabrook anymore. The ones that were there were grandfathered in. One of my best friends has one of them right on Main Street or I should say 2^nd Street.

As a result of this people stayed in tents on their own property for quite a while and as winter came they built small shanties hidden in the back of their property. The city began to inspect these structures and they even showed up at my house. Remember I built my small house in 2005 and did it without anyone really knowing about it so I had no permits, etc. Well the inspector showed up and I told him it is a mother in law house. It is on my daughter’s property. I did not try to hide anything and told him I did my own electrical and plumbing. Told him my dad and brothers were always in the electrical and plumbing business so I pretty much knew how to do all of that. I followed code and he could find nothing wrong other than to say I should have a fire alarm on the ceiling. Five bucks later I had that on the ceiling. He told me I should have had a permit to run the waste into the street hook up but that it happened so long ago there was absolutely nothing they could do now. He thought my house was really cute and well built.

Other people are not nearly as fortunate as I have been. We now have a lot of doubling up of families. Families that either are related to each other or neighbors now sharing the same structure. That is not only because of Ike but also because of the collapse of the economy. There is a lot more unemployment than is being reported. Only 25% of the unemployed in Texas are reported. That means that we actually have almost a million people unemployed now. On my street alone there are 4 houses with extra friends or family living in them and campers all over the place with people living in them. One in 7 US homes are in foreclosure or they are close to it now. 1 in 10 previous working people are now unemployed. Actually it is 1 in 5 because we do not report many of these unless they are currently receiving benefits. Pretty soon I will fall into that category and no longer be counted.

We have one elementary school where over 1/3 of the kids are homeless. They live on the streets with parents or in a shanty under a bridge or in some other unstable environment. So daily over 200 homeless kids show up and it is pretty sad.

For the most part these people are invisible in this country. Nobody wants to see them and so they don’t see them. In Dallas a few years back a group showed up to try to help feed homeless and it created a big stir. It became illegal to feed the homeless because they felt it would increase the homeless. I blogged about that back in I think 2005. I do know that there are active churches in Dallas trying to help.

  The homeless here move around a lot. They can get arrested in Houston if they are living on the streets. Consequently, it is not a good lifestyle as you never know where you are going to sleep. There are homeless shelters but they have rules. Many in Houston are religious type of things and you have to be able to tolerate a certain number of hours of indoctrination before you get something to eat. After a while people figure out it is easier to dumpster dive for food.

So in answer to your question Marge, yes we still have cities of homeless people. They are not all from here; your homeless people find their way to Texas because they would freeze to death in Iowa, Minnesota, etc.

 We have a huge tent city near Harlingen Texas. That is the River Grande Valley. Every time I have gone into Mexico I cross there. The $111 million tent city, between a federal prison and a county jail, is used by the government to hold captured

non-Mexicans until they are sent home. Previously, most such detainees were released into the United States before hearings, and a majority simply disappeared. Civil liberties and immigration law groups allege that out of sight, the system is bursting at the seams. In the Texas facility, they say, illegal immigrants are confined 23 hours a day in windowless tents made of a Kevlar-like material, often with insufficient food, clothing, medical care and access to telephones. Many are transferred from the East Coast, 1,500 miles from relatives and lawyers, virtually cutting off access to counsel. Instead of calling it Gitmo we call it Ritmo. Most of the Mexicans caught are just thrown back over the border. LOL… There are over 30,000 non Mexican’s in our new tent city jails or other locations in the US but I believe most are in Texas. For each person there you pay $78 a night to keep them there. That is where your taxes are going.

Comments on this prison from:

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1433

Detainees are subject to penal system practices, such as group punishment for disciplinary infractions. The tents are windowless and the walls are blank, and no partitions or doors separate the five toilets, five sinks, five shower heads and eating areas. Lacking utensils on some days, detainees eat with their hands.
Because lights are on around the clock, a visitor finds many occupants buried in their blankets throughout the day. The stillness and torpor of the pod's communal room, where 50 to 60 people dwell, are noticeable.

Goodwin described a group of women who huddled in a recreation yard on a recent 40-degree day with a 25-mph wind. "They had no blanket, no sweat shirt, no jacket," she said. "Officers were wearing earmuffs, and detainees were outside for an hour with short-sleeved polyester uniforms and shower shoes and not necessarily socks."
Perhaps more troubling, lawyers said, large numbers of immigrants have been transferred from Boston, New York, New Jersey and Florida, far from their families and lawyers. Because some immigration judges do not permit hearings by teleconference, detainees are essentially deprived of counsel.
Immigration violators in the United States are held on civil grounds and have no right to appointed lawyers. But federal guidelines call for providing them law libraries, telephones and phone numbers for legal aid.

We had a real problem with the general population of the Rio Grande Valley during Ike. They thought it was headed for them and most of the people refused to go to shelters as they thought that ICE would pick them up and send them back to Mexico.

Also did you see on the news that we are sending about 13 Gitmo detainees to a small island and paying the island like 100 million dollars to take them. That is where you tax money is going.

It just gets crazier….

So I hope that answered your question about our tent city problem here…

I feel like a kid again with all my freedom. I spend about 3 hours a day riding my bike and on some days more than that. I did not go out this morning. When I opened my door the heat and humidity left me gasping and for the first time in weeks I did not go out after waking up. It will be in the upper 90’s today with humidity matching the temperature. When I go outside for my bike rides I am soaking wet within 15 minutes. I wear a band around my forehead so I can see. If I don’t do this the sweat pours into my eyes. I carry a gallon of water in my rear basket and if I forget to do this I will have a screaming headache by the time I get home from the dehydration. Even with that said it is worth it. I see all kinds of wildlife and last night I saw an alligator gar. Texas had tried to exterminate these ugly fish but they failed to do so. They believed that the gar was a vicious fish that would eat people. That has been proven wrong but it did not stop them from exterminating and gill netting most of the gar population.

They failed and I am glad they did. The alligator gar looks like an alligator but it does not attack people unless people threaten it. It eats the food it takes whole so it would take a 300 pound garr to eat a person. Yes they used to get that big and eventually we will have the big ones again. Catching one of these big ones will feed a family for a very long time. Remember we have stark poverty here and even in the cities half our children go to be hungry here. So a persons ability to catch a big fish was important and still is important.

The garr I saw was only about 20 inches long so it was a baby. I talked to fishermen along the waterway and they also said they have seen the gar coming back. The gar have two sets of teeth and they are razor sharp teeth. So taking them off your hook is a serious business. There is a good chance you will get snagged by those teeth if you are not careful. Fishermen started saying the gars attacked them but it was incidents where they were taking off the hook. Being from up north where we got big northerns and huge muskies we always used a pliers type of tool to get the hook off. I have never seen a fisherman use one of those here.

It is important to let the big fish take your bait and swallow it before setting the hook. When the bobber takes off, follow it until it stops. This is the fish positioning it to swallow. When the fish starts to move off again is the time to set the hook. Whole mullet is a preferred bait, and many believe in scaling the bait before using it.
Never bring a gar of any size into the boat until you are sure it is dead. Gar especially big ones can really hurt you with those needle teeth. Gar don't consider humans prey but there is one reported attack on a person in Lake Pontchartrain. The person (girl I think) was dangling his/her feet in the water when a large Alligator Gar mistook here splashing foot for a fish. It bit but thankfully let go. Actually that has been proven to be an alligator bite.

Yuppie fishermen use a bow and arrow to snag the gar. They are special bow fishing gear that you buy. You can get set up for about 200 bucks to be a bow fisherman. I have spear fished before on Lake Superior and I assume it is basically the same principle. We would set up our teepee on the ice and watch our fish hole. When a big Muskie went by we would shoot off the spear that had a line attached to it. Only Indians were allowed to spear fish as I recall since we needed to fish to survive on the reservations.

Eventually I might add a bow fishing outfit to my survival gear. I have plenty of fishing gear but no spear or bow fishing gear.

I tried to take a picture of the gar but it was dark against a dark background and it did not work. Gar are excellent to eat. Cleaning them is hard since their scales are like made out of steel.

I will go out again on my bike ride at about 6 pm and be home by 8 pm. Here are some pics from last night….

Look at that picture of the 4 wheeler type of homemade vehicle.  Now look at the rear view mirror.  You can see the guys face perfectly in it.  Odd picture so I threw it in.