Great egret

I love the elegance of herons and egrets. Today I was on my own, wanting to discover the delights of The Woodlands, which is a very new (satellite) town north of Houston. We're staying in the part which is called Hughes Landing and which is brand new built around a lake. There I thought Hughes might have been an early settler with his own pier on the lake, but apparently the whole area with all its buildings belongs to Howard Hughes' descendants/company and I am beginning to suspect that the lake is very much man-made during this decade.  Downtown The Woodlands as far as I can tell consists of two huge blocks of malls, a waterway, a park and a huge semi open air performance pavilion. I captured this great egret in breeding/nesting plumage at the path along the waterway. Once upon a time these beautiful birds were almost extinct because their feathers were wanted for decorating hats ! Now there's so many of them around in The Woodlands that they have to be discouraged from nesting in residential areas, because they are allegedly too noisy and too smelly !

My feet and legs are protesting against all the walking I did (apparently not something Texans do much) so I'm soon going to make myself comfortable on the couch , get some room service food and wait for DJ to return from his meeting and dinner and after dinner meeting ! Too tired to get much editing done so still no album for yesterday's wonderful outing with T and Texann !