Wednesday, 26 and Thursday, 27 February 2020
Our campsite here looked level, but turned out not to be, so I had to keep using my rubber boots as doorstops. But I'm only getting charged $14/night, so I can deal with needing doorstops.
The campsite's water spigot had a feature I haven't seen before. Once I'd attached my hose to the spigot, I searched in vain for how to turn the water on. No handle of any kind anywhere near the site's water line. Finally, I saw a little lever not quite a ½" long hidden behind the spigot. And that was the magic lever - it produced water. But really, it was an ordinary spigot - haven't these folks ever heard of getting spigots with handles on them to turn the water on?
Once I discovered that one of the campers and his dog were leaving on Wednesday morning, I decided to stay over an extra night, so as to have more time to catch up on things. I feel like I'm always playing catch-up - catching up my blog posts and cabin clean-up and window washing and everything else in life these days. It's been a long time since I felt like I was reasonably on top of things, and for someone who has to control OCD tendencies, that's an uncomfortable situation.
Of course, there I was feeling confident that we'd have few problems with other dogs now that that one had left, and suddenly dogs seemed to come out of the woodwork. One person after another after another walked their dogs by our campsite on Wednesday afternoon, and there we were - stuck because of having already paid for the extra day. I don't know how we're going to avoid them.
In fact, Thursday morning when we went on our first walk, we ran into 4 dogs - 4 of them. The most I've ever met on our first walk was 1, and here there were 4. And 3 of them weren't on leashes! I had to cut the walk short just to get us back to the RV without trouble. Felt sorry for my dogs, since yeah, they should be more laid back around other dogs but it wasn't their fault that other owners were so irresponsible. On Friday morning I risked bears and deer and any other wild critters that might be out before dawn and took my dogs out well before sunrise. That worked and we could walk as much as we wanted without rude encounters.
Another unsettling thing about this campground are the signs posted everywhere: BLACK BEAR HABITAT - DO NOT FEED WILDLIFE - REMAIN ON PATH. So I asked at the office and she said yes, they do indeed have bears and yes, they're around now even though it's cold and yes, they do have plenty of deer too. Fortunately, she also said no, they don't have any alligators right now because it's too cold for them - they'll be around in a few months. One out of three - ah, well. But when the dogs alerted on our walks, I paid attention. Never saw anything but other dogs, which was just as well.
What I also saw, when we walked over to the boat launch not far away, were lots and lots of birds. There were at least 2 dozen White Pelicans, and at least 18 Vultures sitting in a few trees, and at least 18 Anhingas doing ditto (different trees), and massive numbers of ducks that I'm certain were Scoters. I first saw them in Alaska and got to be able to recognize them with certainty.
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| Black Scoter |
The Scoter isn't usually supposed to be here either, because the bird book says it's strictly a northern bird that winters along east and west coasts - a sea duck. The Gulf waters off the Louisiana coast are the "extent of irregular or irruptive range in some winters." And we weren't on Gulf waters. We were on a reservoir that was formed out of a bayou in northeastern Louisiana. Which should have meant these ducks were something else. But there simply wasn't anything else in the bird book that looked like a duck and acted like a duck and was all black with a yellow patch on its bill. Nothing. So why were there so many of them? I saw maybe even a hundred of them hanging around the boat launch area. Very odd. Extending their range? Needed a vacation in the better Southern weather?
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