Bugs in New Orleans

We keep the light on

I am sitting on the balcony outside the Clio Suite.  It is quiet.  A few people walk or bicycle by, under the streetlights.  There is the hum of the insects in the air.  The air is coolly refreshing after today.  There are chirping birds in the oak trees in the French Quarter direction.  I think they are swallows.  They may be titmice.  They may be really just be crickets for all I know.  Bugs grow big in this climate.

I can hear the night heron that is roosting in the oak trees in front of the Degas House.  You can always tell the sound of a night heron because it croaks like a duck.   The night heron built a nest on the next block sometime after the end of April.  The mother has been up there, hopping from branch to branch, the whole time.

View from Les Saintes Suite balcony

Our neighbor, who lives in the blue house next door, had a night heron nest in front of his house in 2010.  I am not going to say that a night heron craps like a goose, but I am going to say that it is not the most fastidious of birds when nature takes its course.  Our neighbor had a hard time keeping his stretch of the sidewalk clean.  I helped him out when he was on vacation.

They don't seem to have that problem at any of the bed and breakfasts in our New Orleans neighborhood.  I can see five of them from the balcony, and that is without looking down.  

The corner of North Park and, probably East Park

I had some business between Canal Boulevard and Delgado Community College.  When I took a right after the guitar store, Frau Schmitt pulled her scooter up alongside mine.  "Are you sure we're in the right place?  I don't think we've ever been here before."  She is usually right about these things.  Every day seems like our first time out together.  We only buy about two gallons of gasoline a week between the two of us.

This is not the Audubon Insectarium

Anyhow, there is a house on North Park that has a giant praying mantis on it.  It is a very quiet neighborhood.  If you don't live there, there isn't really any reason to visit.  It is a big cul-de-sac butted up against some elevated train tracks.

Canal Boulevard floods under that train bridge almost every day in summer, but it hasn't rained that much recently.    

A closer view

You never know what you will find when you turn a corner in New Orleans.  Having lived in Rhode Island, I couldn't help but think of Nibbles Woodaway.  

I have written down the directions.

A votre sante,
La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast.