Looking North – click image to enlarge

Brazos Bend State Park.

Home to the American Alligator among thousands of other species.
Looking North from the observation tower

If you like it make it a favorite here.

The story under this image:

A few months ago my brother Agustin and I went hiking to Brazos Bend State Park for the first time.

It’s a vast area full of wildlife. Incredible variety of birds, snakes, deers, alligators, etc.
I brought my camera gear. It was heavy. It was a mid-summer afternoon , really hot in Southeast Texas. We looked all over the swamps for alligators and finally gave up.
Before dusk we met a nice old couple who lived in the area and were frequent visitors, and they both had semi-pro photo gear too.
I asked: why there’s no alligators? They looked at me funny and they said “- what do you mean…? there’s one right there…!”, and he pointed at the swamp a few feet away from us to what I thought it was a log. Then we started seeing more “logs”…we realized that the alligators had been there all the time, we were so imbeciles to not notice them.

I pulled out my camera and started shooting like crazy. Then I passed my brother the off-camera flash and before we knew it was dark. Pitch black dark. We couldn’t see our hands even if we put them right in front of our faces.
Agustin said “-it’s 9:00 and the park closes the gates at 10:00…! We were more than an hour away so we  pulled out our flashlights and started jogging our way back. By the left of the road we had the main swamp and when we pointed the flashlights towards it there were hundreds of pairs of eyes blinking. We made sure we stayed on the road away from the swamp. We made it just in time.

Some more pics:

The swamp - click on image to enlarge

American Alligator at dusk - Click to enlarge

Alligator at night - click to enlarge

Alligator ready to strike - click to enlarge

Little Blue Heron - click to enlarge

I think this is a Little Blue Heron but I might be wrong. Experts please feel free to comment and correct me.

Water Lily - Click on image to enlarge

Water Lily at dusk - click image to enlarge

Acuatic plants - click to enlarge

More images coming in Post #2…