{"id":499,"date":"2013-11-11T23:11:17","date_gmt":"2013-11-11T23:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/?p=499"},"modified":"2013-11-11T23:11:17","modified_gmt":"2013-11-11T23:11:17","slug":"choke-canyon-state-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/?p=499","title":{"rendered":"Choke Canyon State Park"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My friends Mark and Renita enjoy this park a lot, and I&#8217;d driven past it a few times planning on visiting sometime.  They like it for the kayaking and birding, and I can see why.  Nice place.<\/p>\n<p>Before I got settled in I spotted some caracara, green jays, and golden-fronted woodpeckers.  One of my neighbors is an armadillo.  So I guess I&#8217;m in South Texas.<\/p>\n<p>Remarkable is the number of insects, the variety.  And in numbers the butterflies which are everywhere.  They must be migrating, likely heading to Mexico.  I&#8217;ve never tried to figure out butterflies, but there&#8217;s a butter-yellow number that has caught my eye that I&#8217;d like to put a name to.  Not getting a good close look I went to my grill guard to see if I had a sample there.  Nope, but I did pick off a half-dozen species that were interesting.  As well as a few grasshoppers I picked up in Deming and Hatch.  I&#8217;ll wash the truck when I get to Rockport.<\/p>\n<p>Nice park, but the region surrounding it is undergoing mass destruction as big machines scramble in the dirt for holy oil and gas.  Now I&#8217;ll admit that west Texas probably isn&#8217;t the most environmentally sensitive area on the continent, the most damage done when it was overgrazed, but the current destruction seems a little over the top to me.  I think we&#8217;ll regret this someday.<\/p>\n<p>Just an afternoon and evening here, tomorrow it&#8217;s Goose Island on the Gulf Coast.  See how the whooping cranes are doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My friends Mark and Renita enjoy this park a lot, and I&#8217;d driven past it a few times planning on visiting sometime. They like it for the kayaking and birding, and I can see why. Nice place. Before I got settled in I spotted some caracara, green jays, and golden-fronted woodpeckers. One of my neighbors [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":501,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions\/501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}