Bird Butts, A Swim and a Gigantic Cypress

More from our work adventures. Only a few more days out here in the Big Thicket.

We came across a similar nest last week but didn’t get a photo. This time we stopped to peek in…

There were bird butts in there! The term ‘bird butts’ stems from ‘pony butt’ a baby pony we met in the Grayson Highlands on the AT. It carried over to my niece so she would want to see “pony butt” on video. Now any baby animal ends up with ‘butt’ at the end. So, baby bird butts were silently whining for their mom and their unhatched sibling was waiting patiently to come out (hopefully!)

Remember the big tupelo we found a few weeks ago? We found something bigger, though still not a champion size. We looked.

This cypress was pretty darn large, 232 cm in DBH. To compare, the Senator in Florida is 135″ in diameter and ours is 91″ in diameter. Quite large but not Senator large.

It needed a three person hug.

The other day we stumbled across a partially variegated beautyberry! Pretty cool find!

Found a possum climbing a tree…

One of our other coworkers swore he saw a porcupine one day but we are all unsure if it really could’ve been one, though supposedly they are in east Texas…so the running joke now is “it was a porcupine!”.

And normally we wouldn’t have attempted the following video, as the deepest we got was to our chest with our feet firmly on the bottom of the swamp, but this time we prodded the bottom with a stick and felt a very distinctly steep drop off. I guess we were going to go for a swim! We ditched all but our most essential gear, threw our boots and shovel across the channel and wrapped the GPS up in multiple baggies and off we went! This was our return trip.