Fish Story

Great Blue Heron

I subscribe to the old fishing nostrum that the worst day fishing is better than a great day doing pretty much anything else....except, although I do love to fish...it's birding for me. Any day birding is better than almost anything else.

Thus when a good friend offered a day trip to Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge I couldn't say yes fast enough....even though the wildlife drive was still closed for winter.

Sandhill Crane

At 0'Dawn-Thirty we debated....rain until 11...should we go or postpone.

I'll bet you can guess how I voted.

Photo by Kris

By the time we made it half way there, rain was lashing down. Hmm....

However, Northern Shovelers, Green-winged Teal, and Northern Pintails in the visitor's center. pool made it feel like a pretty good plan.

Trumpeter Swan

We soldiered on through intermittent rain, seeing bird after bird after astonishing bird. And we had so much fun. You know those friends the Internet memes mention, with whom you can strike up a conversation after years of separation and never miss a beat? Yeah, like that, only with birds. You can rest easy...most of the world's problems are solved.

The rain behaved as predicted and by noon it was reasonably dry. As we tooled around one country road we saw bumps in a corn field. They were kinda sorta different-ish bumps so we stopped and lo and behold there were three Sandhill Cranes, the main goal birds of the day.

Ring-necked Duck

They posed quite willingly.

We hit the Audubon Center, the Sandhill Crane unit, all the other stops I'm familiar with excepting the wildlife drive because you know...closed and all. 

For the last stop of the day we returned to the main center so Kris could get a hat, as she had forgotten hers. As we drove in we exclaimed in unison, "it's open!"

The park opened a day early just an hour before our second visit. Of course we made the circuit.

We found Cranes!

Cranes, cranes everywhere

At almost the last pool of the day a bird with a bright, orange-red head flew in. We both dismissed it as a Redhead. We had seen several and were counting Gadwalls and figuring out why some females showed more white on the secondaries than others.

Eurasian Wigeon

Something made me take a second look and I was afraid to believe my eyes. Our "Redhead" was a beautiful male Eurasian Wigeon. I was so excited!

It would have been hard to come close to that level of amazement but when we came home there were cranberry barbecue chicken and potatoes boiling on the stove. I thought it was Liz making their dinner.

Instead the boss was cooking supper! He had never cooked chicken before but he knocked it out of the park. We had an awesome and incredible day and that's no fish story.