In brief, these posts serve to introduce new readers — and reintroduce regular readers — to photos from the early days of this blog and, occasionally, to photos from days before this blog came into existence.

Today’s gallery covers some of the photos from our visit to San Leon, TX. It wasn’t a pleasure visit (See Related Post), and when things got to me, I would step out on the deck, turn off my mind, and watch — and photograph — the sights and listen to the sounds of the Galviston Bay. Some of them sights were Pelicans.

The year was 2011, and we — Melisa and I— spent a little over a week there. The original post for these photos is HERE. In this post, I’m sharing the 83 photos and videos from THIS Gallery.

The videos in the gallery appear in the original post as YouTube videos. I’ll insert some here, but if you want to see all the videos, go to the original post or watch them in the gallery.

The title of the blog post is The Bad Boys of San Leon. The name was coined by Melisa, referring to their “cruising” up and down the shoreline.  They appear silently, stream by in long lines looking all tough and serious, and disappear as silently as they appeared.

The austere, semi-prehistoric look gives the impression they are tough customers indeed.  

I don’t know why they cruise in groups or why they go up and down the coastline following the contour of the shore, but they appear very much as if they’re reminding everyone this is their turf. Usually, the first flier determines the path they follow. Whatever the first flier does, the others follow suit, all of them doing so at the same spot.

Sometimes, they have escorts . . .

Most of the groups are small, but you’ll get larger groups every 10-15 minutes, seemingly endless as they stream by.  

I have several close-ups (most of them crops of larger photos) . . .

The full front view presents a visage that hints at perhaps there not being a whole lot going on in that bird brain.

I also watched them fish . . . which consists of diving into the water after dropping like a rock.

One neat thing with them cruising I wasn’t able to capture on video.  When the lead pelican drops down to glide just over the water, all the following pelicans drop down at around the same location, and the result is an escalator-like impression for the observer. . . .

It’s not clear in the photos, and that’s too bad because it’s neat to watch.

They don’t usually let you get too close, but this was sunning itself within range of my big zoom. Brown pelicans are nice-looking birds, perhaps because of their strangeness.

I snapped a lot of photos perhaps best viewed as an animation.

Of course, some photos are best viewed a bit larger . . .

Anyway, interesting birds. I photographed a few white pelicans when they migrated through here, and I’ll probably post those photos sometime soon(ish).

Here’s the slideshow for the gallery. If you prefer, you can just visit the gallery by clicking on the link I provided above.

Note: the transition is set to 2sec, but — if you move the cursor anywhere within the photo — you’ll see a pause button on the lower left, and, once paused, you can use the left and right arrows on both sides of the photo to navigate the slideshow.

If you click anywhere in the photo instead of the pause button, you’ll exit the slideshow and find yourself in SmugMug. You can then scroll through the photos or interact in other ways.

Slideshow of the Bad Boys of San Leon Gallery — (83 photos)

That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.

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