We awoke this morning in South Toledo Bend State Park in Louisiana to the sound of some dull thuds on the side of our trailer. Investigation revealed that the source of the noise was a female cardinal that had found the tinted living room window of our trailer offensive and she was on a campaign to kill the image she could see from an adjacent bush. Her technique was to give the window a stern look, then to puff herself up into a “You lookin’ at me?” stance before repeatedly flying over and smashing her body against the window. We had the same issue with a male cardinal in ’15 in Virginia but this is the first time with a female. We tried opening adjacent windows, hollering at the suicidal tweeter and waving our arms on the inside of the trailer but it was all for naught. She is pissed off about the window and seems unlikely to stop the head banging soon. The sequence she follows takes about thirty seconds so we have two thumps per minute as background noise.
We eventually gave up on our scarecrow or scarecardinal efforts and elected to take a spin around this part of Louisiana. Before we even left the state park, we stopped by the park visitor center for a bit of orientation. There was an informational display that indicated the reservoir is fed by the Sabine River, is better than 60 miles long and 15 miles wide. It has the sixth-largest surface area of any lake in the U.S. but not a lot of water because the land here is nearly dead flat so the lake is shallow. Almost every other camper in the campground has a boat and they use them liberally although I think the fishing conditions are lousy because the wind is blowing at about 20 knots today.
As we drove north along the eastern shore of Toledo Bend Reservoir, we pulled in at some lakeside communities Louisianans have settled into many Dogpatch-like residences spread out along the lake shore. The roads are mostly dirt. Once in a while we would spot a beautiful estate with lots of columns and a foundation but most places merely use unevenly spaced rocks and blocks of concrete stacked under the floors. Few houses are plumb. We also pulled over at a place called Mud Truck Madness where we met an enormous man named Kenneth. Kenneth indicated that the place not only makes funny-looking mud vehicles but is also the venue of driving in the mud competitions that those attracted to glutinous slop find fascinating. We didn’t see any vehicles that could be accessed without the use of a ladder. They even had mud golf carts or Rhinos on site.
We continued up the lake edge to two towns called Negreet and Many. There were some nice houses there, many with foundations. Along the roads, which are narrow and have no shoulders, we passed by stunning displays of wildflowers in a myriad of colors. We spotted many types we never see in the west, where we theoretically reside. We also came across a steel truss bridge that only has 12′-3” overhead clearance. Our GPS device, Randy, was giving us repeated warnings that a low bridge was approaching and we needed to circumvent it because Randy thought we had our trailer behind us and it sticks up 12′-10” into the air. We are glad the GPS has the capability to warn us that we could be headed down a road that may result in the forced amputation of our roof-mounted air conditioners.
By the time we got back home this afternoon, the wind had quit and the park’s critters were out in force. The squirrels here are black. We spotted true blue jays here as opposed to the Stellar’s jays we have gotten used to calling blue jays in the western half of the country. There are also red-bellied woodpeckers, tufted titmice, Carolina wrens, barn swallows and lots of finches and sparrows. In this part of the world black vultures glide around and plenty of them work the edge of the lake looking for dead stuff.
We got a few pictures along the way and you can see them by clicking here