kissalostsoul

Emma and I went for a drive this afternoon just to see what we could see on some of the back roads that are not on the Tamarac NWR.  The sun was shining, the skies were blue, and I just didn’t want to sit around the rig all day.  When I first signed up for this assignment, I was told it was in the north woods of Minnesota.  Well, yes, there are plenty of woods on the refuge, but much of the surrounding area is rolling prairie that has over the years been turned into farmland. With no rain the last few days, the farmers are making hay while the sun shines.  It’s also now clearly visible which fields are growing corn and which fields are growing soy beans.  Because of the long and cold winter, it’s only been recently that the different crops have grown enough to be discernible when driving by the fields.  Most corn will be ‘knee high by the fourth of July’, but compared to other years things are a little behind.  Fellow volunteer Steve, from North Carolina, says that saying down sout

Last night after I published my blog post, I put something back into one of the cabinets that is over the windshield.  As I shut the door, there was a loud crash on the dashboard.  For years I’ve had one of those round cheap big clocks stuck to the middle of one of the cabinets with industrial strength Velcro.  Well, it bit the dust last night.  When I got up this morning, both of my cheap Walmart watches had quit working… dead batteries I’m guessing.  Hmm.  Interesting that most of my time keeping devices crapped out within hours of each other. I left the rig at some time this morning to head to town for my weekly grocery trip with a watch and clock added to the list.  First stop was the Saturday morning farmer’s market to pick up another delicious loaf of bread from the Fargo Breadsmith booth.  There was quite a line this morning, and they were out of my first choice by the time it was my turn, but I got a nice crusty loaf of rustic Italian bread.  Nothing much beats a nice slice o

The first reason I went to Fargo yesterday was to find a Best Buy store.  I finally reached the point where I wanted a much smaller camera for special circumstances.  I’m very happy with the two Canon Rebel SLR cameras that I have, but they are rather big and bulky to carry around.  I thought I’d be going on a wildlife adventure today at the refuge where it might not be the best idea to take my SLRs along.  Turns out that assignment got cancelled due to the windy weather, but is rescheduled for several days next week. I wanted a camera that was compact enough to slide into the pocket of my life vest should I find myself out canoeing the sometimes unpredictable waters on the refuge.  This is what I chose.  It’s a Canon PowerShot SX280 HS, and when the power is shut down the lens and flash retract.  It’s small and compact, and a challenge for me to learn how to use. I’ve always had a viewfinder to look through in all the cameras that I’ve owned in the last fifty years.  It’s hard f

Heavens to Murgatroyd!  How embarrassing.  I’ve been spelling this Minnesota exclamation Uf-dah, but I found out while playing tourist today that it’s really Uff-da, with or without the dash.  After only twenty years of using it, I stand corrected. I was off this morning to Fargo/Moorhead for some shopping.  I’m not into shopping much, as my clothes can attest to, but I needed a city with big box stores, and Fargo, ND, is the closest one.  I’ll tell you tomorrow what it was I couldn’t live without. Fargo is an hour and a half drive away, so I thought I’d stop in at the Fargo-Moorhead Visitors Center while I was there to find out what’s important to see in the area.  For such a huge building, that was a former grain elevator, the visitors center portion is really quite small, but they hand out free bags of tasty hot popcorn.  Score!    This is a good place to stop if you’re in the area for several reasons. A couple of weeks ago, I ordered the movie “Fargo”from Netflix, since I

Back in 1966, Chandler Robbins began the North American Breeding Bird Survey.  The results of the BBS are valuable in evaluating the increasing and decreasing range of bird populations which can be a key point to bird conservation.  That first year, there were only 600 official routes mainly starting in Maryland and the surrounding area.  Presently, there are about 3700 active routes throughout the US and Canada. Each route is exactly 24.5 miles long, and remains the same year after year so population trends can be studied.  The BBS is one of those great citizen scientist projects that birders can get involved in to help insure the continued existence of our avian community.  Cooperators (me) begin the driving route exactly one half hour before sunrise at stop one.  (That’s why I had to get up shortly after 3 a.m. so I could take Emma out, eat breakfast, pack the truck with equipment, and get to the starting point 15 miles away on back roads by exactly 5:01.) After looking for and

I was up and out early again today to do my atlas-ing of the Booth Lake block.  I don’t just randomly drive around hoping to see birds.  There is some method to this madness.  Nature has a biological clock just like we do.  I’ve pretty much established what birds are present on each of the blocks, but now I have to find proof of their breeding.  The easiest ways to do this is to see a species building a nest, carrying food for young in their beaks, or finding recently fledged young ones.  It all depends on the calendar.                                                                           Male wood duck. There are a couple of general rules of thumb.  Just as the larger the bird, the longer its lifespan, the same goes, in general, for the larger the bird, the longer the eggs need to incubated before hatching.  That little chestnut-sided warbler nest we found will only take 12 days or so to produce young.  Eagles, and ducks, and larger birds will take up to or more than a mon