The Things you See

Inside a duck blind

At Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge

A one-legged Ring-billed Gull 

Eating road killed cheeseburger

In a McDonald's parking lot

Double decker farm peeps on the prowl

Ferocious kitchen wolves going in for the kill

There is no time for boredom, no way, nohow....

Birds before Coffee

I was on the way up to the cable with Finn, when the teeniest rooster crow ever was emitted from behind the wood stove. It was a Silver-laced Wyandotte that won't come to the barn and instead roosts up there. He sounds like the smallest bantam, but is a normal sized bird. I wonder how long he will hang on with all the wild predators around here. 

Then a Red-tailed Hawk came sailing in to perch in the dead elm among the starlings. It was pretty funny. Sun not up yet, cold as a well digger's elbow, and the starlings just sat there for a moment with this giant...as compared to them...predator shouldering them aside on the bare limb.

Suddenly they realized, and took off in unison like scalded cats.
 

Spike

I know Red-tails don't hunt starlings much, but I don't blame them for getting gone. On cold winter days the hawks sometimes come down and hunt, on the wing, under the eaves of the old heifer barn. It is a sight to see, these great big clumsy hawks of the open fields and forests trying to turn upside down in flight to take starlings and House Sparrows out of the eaves. I think they must get some because they do it a lot.

Turn about is fair play. A little while later a mob of crows had the hawk captive on a telephone pole and were jeering and leering at it like the bullies they are. Could this be Manhattan? 

Anyhow, all these cool birds being around got me out for a bird walk before I even turned on the computer or got coffee. It was sweet too. Sometimes it's as if God opens Heaven and pours out some birds just to make my day. 

It was a gorgeous dawn, freckled with Juncos and full of frost and sunshine. I am most thankful and will gladly take any others like it that are sent my way.

Visiting the Redheads

For the entire month of October my birding was limited. That whole tick thing..... Then weather, being busy, and a renewed onset of tick phobia kept me from getting much birding or walking done.

Finally, Monday, late in the day, when dusk was just then falling I went out on the hills to visit the redheads. The oaks are about the only trees still showing color here, but they are lovely. Their bright red heads glowed in the late light like matches against the dark limbs of the other trees and the shadowy bulk of the mountains.

I was happy to still be able to climb the hill, although there weren't quite as many birds as I might have liked to see. I think I saw an American Tree Sparrow, first of the fall season, but my binoculars were way out of adjustment, and by the time I got them right it was gone.

Then there was the strangeness...... I heard a sound like a small motor right over my head. I thought it was a plane at first. When I finally realized that it was a flock of about 40 very fast flying robin-sized birds it was too late to get the binoculars on them. Not any kind of blackbird I don't think because there was no chirping sound, only those very loud wings. I do mean loud.

I wonder what they were. Except for them the birding was late fall ordinary, chickadees, juncos and robins...

There were some really large coyote tracks and some mysterious smoke as well. 
Now it is time to play nice again. Put some kitties or puppies on Facebook, or birds...birds would work.....and put the terrible foulbrood behind us.

On the bright side...no more campaign fliers. Think of the happy trees!

Who Worked 9 Hours

And then drove 4 1/2 hours home....

To vote......?

Yeah, this guy. And now he has to drive back.

And yes, his parents are proud of him, although I will be a lot happier when I hear that he is safely in Boston....

Dug out my favorite red flannel shirt and.....

MooseQuest

The word for the weekend was intrepid. What else could you say about "Let's go to Maine," at around 8:30 on Friday morning?

On the road by 9:24?

A thousand or so odd miles, some of them very odd indeed, in pursuit of the elusive moose?

And we did see moose. Moose on realty signs. Moose on stores. Moose on township names and lakes. Moose statues, moose figurines, moose menus. I even saw the neck and ear of a road killed moose on I 95.

The Golden Road

It is MUCH worse than it looks

We drove 59 miles (one way) on a dirt and "pavement" washboard, corduroy, "road" to see Moose Head Lake. We listened trustingly to the b*tch in the box....er...Garmin, who said that the thing we were on was a through road. We rolled along dodging hunters and other general madmen, driving at us at fifty or sixty mph in the middle of the road sending rooster tails of mud, rocks, and dust in our general direction......(she led us astray several other times and may find herself at the bottom of the Camaro sized pothole at the beginning of the Golden Road if she isn't careful.)

We drove and drove and drove for hours, only to find a checkpoint where we had to stop...yes, a checkpoint...manned by a pleasant, if dour, Canadian fellow who said when asked where the road went.

"Can-a-da."

Us, "What's out there?"

"Nothing much."

Us, "Can we make it?"

"I wouldn't advise it in your ve-hi-cle," he muttered, shaking his head at the muddy Camaro....because yeah, Camaro.....

He was very funny what with his dry way of looking at the loons from NY who drove a thousand miles to not see an actual live moose (hunting season just ended.....) and get a lot of mud on their car. I don't think he found us very amusing though. We turned around and drove 59 miles on back.

Alan was admiring the mud on the CamCam
when I suggested all it lacked was flames on the side...
so he made some....got some good laughs on the Interstate I'll tell you.

Oddly enough, other than being scared spitless on the "Golden Road", (the article guy's description of the road is a downright lie, except for the pickup trucks) we really had a lot of fun. 

We share the same sarcastic humor, so the jokes and quips and digs and squibs flew all weekend, and we laughed a lot, until we ran out of giddy-up-go and put a Ranger's Apprentice book on Audible on the car speakers for the last dark miles of the trip.


We saw mountains. Katahdin. Washington, and plenty of others perhaps less famous.... they were stunning...jaw dropping...wonderful...what with their shawls of lacy snow, scarves of dense grey clouds, and attitudes of haughty grandeur. I did not get one single good photo of any of them so you will have to trust me on this.....

We fell in love with New Hampshire. I could live there and I don't often say that of places that aren't NY.

Nonetheless, we were not sorry to see the bottom of the Northview driveway around 8 last night.. 

If you want to see pictures of actual moose...go here. We decided that if we ever do indeed go there we will not take the Camaro. Chevy did not intend her for off-roading. However, she deserves mad props for getting us there and getting us home and showing her mettle to everything Maine had to offer.

Neighbors

We have some dear neighbors who have been through some real hard times lately. I won't say; it's their story. Suffice to say there is no such thing as enough sympathy...... The dad of the family stops in every now and then to talk to the boss. There are many decades of friendship there and they can always talk....

The house always looks like a cyclone touched down on those days and I always apologize and wish it was clean. Not that it is ever very clean, but it is sometimes worse than other times.

This morning I woke up and thought, 'I've got to get this kitchen in order because x is going to stop today. It would be nice if was clean for a change.'

I just had a feeling.....Of course I didn't think it was really going to happen, but I dabbled around doing some dishes and picked up a bit here and there.....it's still a mess, but somewhat less of a mess than it was when I got up.

And then came the knock on the door....yeah, as a dear friend said the other day.... We are all connected in our minds, some closer than others.....

So there is some therapeutic talking over of the old times of farming going on all around me. The kitchen is still a mess....maybe later, maybe later.

Or maybe not.

It's all Downhill

Bacon Bone!!!

Yesterday was one of those days that start off kilter and go downhill from there. First was the ice cold shower. I know there are people who choose that option, but myself not so much. The stove was hot. The water wasn't.

Then it was just too crazy to finish any of my writing chores. Wednesday is deadline, but I do love to be done on Tuesday and have those decks all clear the rest of the week.

The washer acted up. It took all day to get it to spin.

The cold water situation turned out to require several trips for parts and a lot of wrenching.

The heat quit. It wasn't all that cold yesterday but it sure was too cold for no heat.

The litany of minor but messy woes just went on and on. By day's end I was afraid to touch a dial or turn a faucet.

However, the guys soldiered on and replaced a valve in the hot water plenum, found where the circulation pump for the heat had gotten unplugged, eventually the washer worked, and we all survived to do it again another day.

On the bright side it turns out that the valve was the reason we have had very limited hot water for a very long time. Last night there were hot showers all around, a bath for Peggy and some very happy people.

The old S 10 truck got repaired and painted to be a mobile birding blind...the ticks are so terrible that we don't even want to ride the four-wheeler up in the field..... and we had a great supper of homemade beef stew.  

It's all good.

A Wall of Wings

What is this guy doing in the wildlife refuge hanging out with the Canada Geese?
A barnyard goose, known when wild as a Greylag. 

Triangles of black, diamonds of red, flashing before our eyes, or in my case before the binoculars, like moving wallpaper against the sky. Red-winged Blackbirds. Hundreds.....thousands even, taking off in unison just as we parked the car near a marsh in Wayne County. A veritable quilt of birds like something in a National Geographic special.

Scaup

It was a sight I will never forget. All I could say was wow...wow.....wow....over and over again. We tried to get photos of the phenomenon, but they weren't all that afraid of us, and there was only the shuttling of a few here and a few there after that first great flight. Still, even the sound of their calls was amazing.

Click to embiggen

It was the culmination of one of the greatest days of birding I have ever experienced. 

Before we even left our home county we passed under a sky penciled with flocks of hundreds upon hundreds of Canada Geese. At the swamp the flights seemed endless, and included stunning clouds of ducks. More ducks than I ever imagined existed.

They dove and dabbled and napped on the surface of the pools near the access loop road, just waiting to be admired and photographed.

There were so many American Wigeons, Ring-necked Ducks, Northern Shovelers, and Gadwalls, that we soon looked past them for more exotic fare. Mind you I never saw a Gadwall before our Florida trip but yesterday we saw hundreds.

Ruddy Ducks and Canvasbacks are normally big deal-type birds for us. Yesterday we saw a plethora of the latter and enough of the former to actually get photos of them. Lots of Scaup too.

Alan hunted down the marsh where the Sandhill Cranes nested this summer. As we drove up the dirt road, a flock of swans flew across in front of us. Swans. I know they are common in some places, but we sure don't see them very often down here on the eastern Mohawk. There was even a flock of twenty or so noodling around in a cornfield, for all the world like Canada Geese only bigger. Whiter. Rarer by far.

It was really a lot of fun.

The S10 'Blackbird'

Or, how to turn your old red lawn ornament into a traveling birding stealth blind.

Some of the tools involved.....nasty vicious blackberry vines from up behind the lawn.

The original, although she didn't look quite this pristine after a year and a half of trips back and forth to Jersey and another couple of years sitting in the yard.