Del Rio News Herald

I’ve been sick all week. My doctor diagnosed bronchitis and prescribed the proper medications. Naming the condition helped – at least I knew I wasn’t going to die of it, although there were a couple of moments Wednesday morning when I wondered about that – and the antibiotics and the nasty-tasting cough syrup helped.

What has speeded my recovery the most has been sleep, as much of it as I could get. As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to listen to my body more in this regard: When it says, ‘Go to bed and catch a few hours of shut-eye,’ I try to pay attention.

But because I’ve been sick, I haven’t been out and about as much this week as I usually am.

On Saturday morning, I woke up feeling better than I had in a week, and I decided I would make another trip out to the old cemetery – Cementerio La Loma De La Cruz. I’ve been writing about this historic south side cemetery a lot lately, and I hope you’ll bear with me while I write about it a little more.

Some of you may know that on Thursday night, a “friends” association to restore and preserve El Cementerio was reborn, and that now there is a group working on behalf of the old burial ground and all its rich history.

I decided that I would drive out to the cemetery early and try to do some drawings of the cemetery grounds. If I had enough time, I also wanted to try and sketch the location and dimensions of some of the grave markers in it.

And, if time remained, I thought I’d do a little birdwatching.

I’ve said it before: Cemeteries are wonderful places to birdwatch. They’re usually green spaces filled with trees, they are quiet and there usually aren’t a whole lot of people in them. The perfect setting.

Much to my delight, Michael G. volunteered to accompany me on Saturday morning’s outing. He is much better at things like scale drawings and taking readings and visualizing a three-dimensional space than I am.

We ran into Terry DeBinski, Eva Koog and Tommy Koog at the cemetery. Apparently, they’d also had the idea of coming by in the cool of the morning to do their own documentation.

As Mike and I prepared to do our little drawing, a pair of Black-bellied Whistling Ducks went winging by overhead. These large, goose-like ducks are easily identified by the whistling calls they make as they fly.

Although my Sibley’s doesn’t show these birds as year-round residents of the Del Rio area, they are. I’ve seen several of these striking birds with broods of chicks on quiet, out-of-the-way bodies of water like the settling ponds at Laguna De Plata and far edges of the Duck Pond in Cienegas.

The hackberry trees that line the road to El Cementerio are filled with Yellow-breasted Chats, a large, distinctive warbler that seeks out this type of dense brush near water.

The Chat’s call is worthy of a Hollywood sound man – a bewildering and most un-birdlike conglomeration of whistles, shrieks, clucks and even, as Sibley notes, “mechanical sounds such as a woodpecker drumming.”

When I first started birding, I often followed these intriguing sounds coming from the deep brush for a very long time, wondering and wondering what marvelous sort of new bird could be making them, and the source of the sounds often turned out to be a Chat.

Mike and I made our drawings and were able to be back home before the day got to be too hot.

Hopefully, I’ll be feeling well enough next week to spend a little more time out and about.

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Contact the author karen.gleason(at)delrionewsherald.com

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