GOOSE ISLAND SP AND ARANSAS NWR, TEXAS

We decided to ring in the New Year as auspiciously as Airstream Interstate owners could - by overnighting at a state park and visiting a National Wildlife Refuge on the way back home from it.  Here is a photo essay of this adventure.

Goose Island State Park is known for being home to "the" Big Tree, the holotype old coastal live oak, which is believed to be well over 1,000 years old.  

The park itself is physically separate from its namesake big tree, and is not a very large state park at that.  However, one can still rack up quite a long walk exploring  it on foot.  Screengrabbed from the Map My Walk free app.  

Getting a hook-up reservation in any Texas state park on a holiday is a near-impossibility, even in the dead of winter, even in cold and wet conditions, as we were having.  This was a spur-of-the-moment trip, and by some miracle, I managed to reserve the very last available bayfront site.  However, my husband doesn't enjoy such raw exposure - he prefers privacy and shelter from the wind.  When we arrived at the park office, they were able to re-situate us in a forested area on the north side of the Lantana Loop.

Full PDF park map here.  

Beautiful in its own way, million-dollar waterfront view - but no privacy.  This is the southwest "arm" of the bayfront sites on Goose Island. 

This became our site instead.  The bayfront sites are more expensive but not only do you not get a refund when switching, TPWD charges a $5 administrative fee for the downgrade.  But that's OK.  I'd prefer to see our parks making more money and expanding to keep pace with Texas' remarkable population growth.    

Every time I visit a new park, I learn some new RVing enjoyment strategy.  There were several campers who had tarped their bayfront picnic shelters to cut the cold north wind.  This individual had also squeezed his/her trailer right up against the structure for additional shelter.  Not their first rodeo, obviously.  

What it lacks in size, Goose Island makes up for in character and history.  Part of the park was developed as a Civilian Conservation Corps project.  This kind of distinctive, timeless building with impossibly thick concrete walls is a dead giveaway of CCC activity in the distant past.  

We are still reaping those rewards 80 years later.  Screengrabbed from Google/Wiki.  

Character, history, and Texas mid-coast beauty:  "Have you ever seen that color purple before?" I asked my husband, who is a native Houstonian.  He said no, but the shades were not captured by the digital camera.  Imagine this scene with an extra dimension of purple added to it.  

Cabbage head jellyfish in clear water, near the bayfront bulkhead.  Too cold to swim on this trip, but maybe someday (when there are fewer cabbage heads, although they don't sting that badly).  

Lots and lots of oyster, of course, the mighty little building blocks of the Texas coast.  

The park's finger pier extends quite a distance out into Aransas Bay and crosses an old oyster reef.

Character, history, Texas mid-coast beauty, and BIRDS!!  Here are a few of them.

One of nature's most astonishing come-back stories - the brown pelican, extirpated west of Florida, an endangered species as of 1970, but today you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one of them.

The other species in this photo is the white pelican, a mostly-migratory species, but not in Texas.  It's rare to see two same-niche species side by side, but this may have something to do with the incredible short-term rebound of the brown pelican.  

And you could indeed hit one with a dead cat carelessly swung.  It's easy to see why they basically went extinct in Texas - they don't have the sense God gave a flea.  You can walk right up to them and they generally don't care.  Although DDT is most commonly blamed for their disappearance, I bet this behavior was a contributing factor.  

Their cousins exercise a bit more discretion.  They will keep their distance. 

The other type of waterfowl in abundance was bay ducks.  At least some of these are redhead ducks.  

And I believe that these are a goldeneye species, male and female.  

This is what ducks do best - they show the world their butts.  

This was not the shot I intended to take, but it's an interesting composition anyway.  Great egret flying by some private residences near the state park boundary.  

Inland species were also present in abundance, including the ever-present grackles.  

A female cardinal...

...and her ever-watchful husband. 

At Goose Island, we did not see the resident rock star...

...but we did see where they would be, if they'd seen fit to stop by for some fandom.  

For whooping cranes, of course, the real destination is Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, which was set aside specifically for them.

See tiny little Goose Island State Park?  It's a fraction of the size of Aransas NWR to the northeast. 

Very little of Aransas NWR is accessible to the general public, but it's worth paying the entrance fee just to get to this viewing platform, which is vaulted well above the tree canopy.  

You can see one of the older, lower platforms in the background, photo left.  As of the date of this blog post, the jury was still out on the identity of that white bird near photo center (I emailed photos of it to one of my expert birding friends).  

Looking inland from the main platform, an amazing piece of engineering.  

We may not have seen any whoopers on this trip, but oh my word - the deer!  I've never seen such an onslaught of deer!  

In twos, threes, fours, fives, they were the local entertainment committee - running down the road, running across the road - obviously these guys haven't learned to fear the barrel of a hunting rifle.  

Much like the bay ducks, they showed me their butts.  And for the first time I noticed that not all deer butts are the same.  Some have almost black tails.  Some are almost all a light tan color.  Age?  Gender?  I don't know.  Prior to this trip, I also did not know that deer squat to poop, much like dogs.  I thought their waste would simply fall gravitationally to the earth, as with cows and horses.  Fascinating new factoid for me, eh?  LOL.

We had terrible weather on the second day of this trip, as it rained ceaselessly with temperatures in the low 40's.  We left Aransas NWR to return to Houston after my knee-length, sub-zero goose down winter parka became soaked all the way through to the inside, and became so cold to the touch that it began to feel like my coffin rather than my coat.  But that's the beauty of traveling and camping in a well-appointed Class B RV - no matter how bad it gets outside, there is always that warm and secure retreat.

One of the more unusual views of our Airstream Interstate, as seen from the Aransas NWR main wildlife viewing platform.  It'll look even cooler and be even more versatile once we get those solar panels in place on that roof.