Loop Road and Shipp/Stagners Lake, Smithville, Texas For great birding in Bastrop County, try birding Loop Road and Shipp/Stagners Lake! Loop Road is a beautiful country drive crowned by Shipp Lake on the eastern end. The 6 mile loop starts and ends at Highway 71 at points about 2 miles apart.. At the eastern pointContinue reading
Author: Tammy Brown
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Bastrop County Hotspots–Birding Loop Road and Shipp/Stagners Lake
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Birding Bastrop Hotspots-Sayer’s Road
Birding Bastrop Hotspot Sayer’s Road Bastrop, Texas is an excellent birding destination, and one of the best places to find birds is Sayer’s Road, a designated eBird birding hotspot. Most”birders know how to look up “hotspots” on eBird. Hotspot information includes a map, birds ever seen, birds likely to be seen, a bar chart ofContinue reading
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Nature and Connection
Nature grounds me, teaches me acceptance, reminds me how temporary my problems are, and helps me understand both the power and the insignificance of this moment in time. A few more things I’ve learned…
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Turtles!–Turtles in Bastrop, Tx
walked down to the creek on Saturday morning, a sunny day after a heavy rain. The water was chocolate-colored like Willie Wonka’s river, and dotted with more turtles than I ever remember seeing at one time–Texas River Cooters, Red-eared Sliders, and huge Texas Spiny Softshells. I love the turtles–the way they pile onto logs and plop into the water when they sense they are being watched. Here are some photos of the Bastrop, Texas turtles we see at Little Piney on Piney Creek.
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Birding and Nature in Costa Rica 2021
We did something controversial–we traveled to Costa Rica last week in the middle of an escalating pandemic. This trip was scheduled in 2019 for fall of 2020, cancelled, and rescheduled for January. We had long conversations about cancelling but the window to do that passed, and suddenly the trip was on. I have to say,Continue reading
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Austin Studio Tour 2020: Art in the Days of Covid-19
Austin Studio Tour Starts This Weekend–online Austin Studio Tour Online The Austin Studio Tour 2020 starts this Saturday, November 14. As always, it runs for two weekends and features local artists in their studios, homes, and galleries. This year the tour combines East and West, and features over 400 Austin artists. I am pleased toContinue reading
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Painting Little Piney Lost Pines
Little Piney Landscape painters are often known for painting a particular setting–one that is deeply familiar and well-loved by the artist. For quite awhile, I only wanted to paint Little Piney. In the last year or two, I have also painted landscapes from other Central Texas locales and from travel to places like New MexicoContinue reading
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Long Hot Summer
From quarantine to the brutal murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd recorded and witnessed by all of us, an outbreak of rage and protests, and the relentless climbing numbers of Covid-19 deaths, it was difficult not to be entirely consumed by bad news as spring slipped into the stifling heat of summer. Spring passedContinue reading
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My COVID-19 Story
The Onset of COVID-19 The symptoms started on Monday—fever, dry cough, fatigue. I felt like I had a cold without sinus congestion but my skin had the sunburned feeling I get when I have a virus. The next day I learned I had been probably been exposed to COVID-19 the week before. I tried toContinue reading
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Little Piney Update–Part I
Time flies by like a bird, and while I have rough drafts of exactly 5 blog posts in my files, I haven’t published a post since September. For this Little Piney update from Bastrop, Texas I’m covering some of the birding highlights of the past 5 months. American Kestrel One of our most beautiful birds,Continue reading