Almost Heaven...but not quite. And then finding my way Home

This weekend will go down in my personal history book as one of the longest, hardest of my life.
I had some programs scheduled way over on the other side of Ohio, in Portsmouth. Being so close to West Virginia, I thought I would sneak over the border and see some birds...and recapture the magic I found there at the New River Bird and Nature Festival. That week in WV changed me in a very visceral way and I wanted to feel it again, that thrill of the mountains.

But it wasn't the same. I missed my people.
I wanted Lynne beside me, crying for joy at her first sight of a Cerulean Warbler.
I wanted Mary and Nina there to get fantastic photos and share them with me.
I wanted Kathi to ID the birds singing outside and sit back with me to open a bottle of wine.
I wanted Kathie to light up at the sight of yet another eastern US lifer.
I wanted Jane there to give me that sweet smile and tell me to Embrace My Inner Sheep.
I wanted Tim to entice me to join him in the hot tub.
I wanted to look at Beth and cause her to break into fits of helpless laughter.
I wanted to sit out on the porch swing with Laura and whisper secrets into the night air.

I was a lonely member of a Flock who had not made the journey with me. NOT the same...

It was raining as I got into Fayetteville. Big surprise.
I got a picture of the bridge I had been so afraid of...



...and smiled at the rhododendron in bloom:


Found a tiny perfect pink mushroom.

The birds were quieter than they had been in late April. Breeding is slowing, and the migrants have passed. Oh, well.

Before I left for the trip, I emailed Geoff Heeter (check this post...Geoff is the one shouting, "I like to DANCE!") and asked if he and his family would like a private raptor show, since I was in the area. He loved the idea, so I was welcomed into his lovely home and did a program for him, his charming wife, his kids, the neighborhood kids, the parents of the neighborhood kids....right in Geoff's kitchen. It was fun and relaxed, and the kids loved it.

I was able to meet Geoff's chickens...one of them here being held by Geoff's daughter:



And I don't know what Geoff is feeding these chickens, but they have reached gigantic proportions:

Look out, little girl! That chicken looks hungry!


The impromptu program for Geoff's family was the highlight of the trip. I spent all day today driving back home. Five hours in the car.

Unhappy birds in the back (they had been living in their carriers for 2 days, and that just makes them cranky...and Lucy wouldn't eat at all...I was a wreck) and a sore neck and the melancholy of leaving West Virginia somehow unclaimed.
I went there looking for something, and I couldn't find it. I left with a special sadness in my heart.


After stopping at the house to pick up my family to go get the other car from the shop, I then drove the birds back to RAPTOR.
Then it was off to Indiana, to my niece's graduation party.


I miss Indiana and the parties that are to be had.
Some things you can find there:

Manly games of Cornhole, played here on a "Breast Cancer Awareness" board:

You have to live west of Vine Street (that's the dividing line in Cincinnati that tells you if you are a "West Sider" or one of those uppity "East Siders") to play Cornhole.
I think some uppity East Siders are picking up the game, I guess when they want to come off their high horses and try to act like common folk.

(I live on the East side of Cincinnati, but since I grew up in Indiana, I am forgiven and allowed to cross the state line)

The food at a party in southeastern Indiana is delicious and truly horrible for you, hence the appeal:

Side dishes like Skyline Dip, Seven-Layer Salad, Fritos with everything, and the most Heavenly Bar-B-Que Chicken Dip you have ever tasted. It comes with a HazMat warning.
Who the Hell brought vegetables?????



And the only way to cook your food is with large...no, make that massive....amounts of OIL (lard if you are feeling extra naughty):

Everything has to be deep-fried. (Look, Laura! A cooking barrel!)


Fried chicken...and French Fries and also fried pickles and fried Twinkies. Seriously.
For those of you who aren't privy to the ways of Indiana...like I said to someone this weekend, "We may be part of the North, but we ain't YANKEES."

You need something cold and delicious to wash down all that grease, and that's where this contraption comes in:
An invention of my brother's....a refrigerator that has a beer tap right on the side:


You need to have this Oh-So-Cool fridge, because you need to be able to put your HALF-BARREL somewhere:

Yes. A half-barrel. Not a KEG...a HALF-BARREL.
There were three half-barrels at the party today...and when I left, they were down to one.
Boo-Yah!!!!!

Bright, Indiana has its own gang sign.
I could tell you what it means, but then I'd hafta kill ya.

Let's hear it for 200 and 300 !!!

Somehow, Kathi talked me into a bird walk with the Cincinnati Bird Club today. It started at 8 am, and the distance meant I had to be up at 6 am. UG. I don't DO pre-dawn, man.

But I'm glad I went.

Just a handful of birders, and a fun guide named Charlie.
(the guy with the scope and blue shirt, and the woman on the left in blue are my "groupies"...they seem to show up to nearly every program I do at any Hamilton County Park and know RAPTOR's birds very well)




We saw a gator out on Oxbow Lake....

(okay, okay...it's a log.)




The reason this trip was worth it....Bird Number 200!

Stilt Sandpipers...four of 'em.
I did the Life Bird Dance...the group (except Kathi, who knows the Life Bird Dance) must have thought I was crazy.
200 different species of birds. Wow. When I became a birder, I never thought I would see 50.

A total of 28? species were seen today...I'm not 100% sure. Kathi's the record keeper, so she can do the math for us.
Another special moment...I was scanning the far shore and saw a "duck". The light was bad, the bird was far away. But it looked "teal-ish", which got Kathi all in a froth. Turns out that Green-winged Teal would be a life bird for her. And not only a life bird, but her 300th!
We couldn't ID it, so we walked on, hoping to see a male to make the ID easier. The bird in question was a smallish, brown mottled duck with a dark head. And we couldn't see the speculum.
Farther down, we got it: Green-winged Teal!
Kathi did the Life Bird Dance, and I dutifully documented it with a photo:

"Raise your hands in the air and wave 'em like you just don't care..."

Yay, Kathi!


PS>>>>>If you would like to read what Chet Baker thinks of me, go check out Julie's post for today.

It's so random, it's scary. (And Happy June First!)

While going through some of my Flickr photos, I noticed a few pics I hadn't posted.
Back to my bird trip at the beginning of the month:
This is Mona Rutger, a wildlife rehabber who has helped countless animals, along with her husband Bill, in Castilia, Ohio for the past 15 years. And she was also name Animal Planet's Hero of the year for 2006.
I waited for a quiet moment, then stepped up to introduce myself. What a nice woman. Unbelievably knowledgeable, passionate. Nobody does it like Mona.

This is Baby, a four-year-old bald eagle in training for education programs at "Back to the Wild". Blinded in one eye after being hit by a train, she is doing quite well. A very well-behaved bird, considering she just started training. And watching little Mona (who is all of 5 feet tall) handle this huge eagle....it made me want to go lift weights and quit whining about how heavy our red-tails are.

Back to the Wild not only rehabs raptors, but other critters, too.
This is a flying squirrel who is a permanent resident there.
Did you know that, at least in Ohio, flying squirrels outnumber red and gray squirrels combined?
I would wet myself happily if I ever got to see one in the wild.

This belongs in BOTB's "Big Giant Things" file.
This giant waiter stands beside a BP station on the Marblehead peninsula. Whatever he used to be carrying is lost to the annals of time.

And to the present:
A cedar waxwing:

And he was LOOKING at me!
Are they not just about the most regal bird ever?
And so polite. They SHARE food with each other. Such nice manners.

Blog update for Kathi:
It's actually working ( I see that some of you have already discovered it)
Go to KatDoc's World and show her some of that Blogging support!

The weekend cometh...and I am so ready to bird-party.
"Throw your hands in the air...like you just don't care..."

Update on my womanly woes...
The medication prescribed has finally worked. As in, my cycle has been kick-started again.
And boy, is it PISSED.


Yep. I'm proud of that one.
Admit it. You have missed my sketches.

In closing, a little song from Kermit:



"Have you been half asleep
and have you heard voices?
I've heard them calling my name.
Is this the sweet sound that calls the young sailors?
The voice might be one and the same.
I've heard it too many times to ignore it.
It's something that I'm supposed to be.
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
the lovers, the dreamers and me.
La, la la, La, la la la, La Laa, la la, La, La la laaaaaaa"

Home, sweet home.

I got back home around 7 this evening, after a very long, misdirected drive. I ended up going back a different way that I came, so I spent a good amount of time in Fremont, Ohio. Ever heard of it? I didn't think so.
I'm in a sort of post-trip let down period, but I am sure that I will snap out of it.
On the home front, the baby chickadees are getting feathered out, and the horny tree swallows dropped one egg while I was gone.

Yesterday's sunset was so full of color, I felt like I could reach out the window and grab some.

Today, I took the auto tour at Ottawa NWR. I realized that I didn't have time to take the ferry to Kelley's Island, unless I wanted to be home, like, now.

Within its 9,000 acres the refuge has marshes, open water, wooded wetlands, coastal wetlands, shrub lands, grasslands, cropland and an estuary. In short, it's basically a huge bird magnet.

Stinker in flight.

A lot of the reserve looks like this.
This part of Ohio is as flat as a pancake, and before we started messing with it, the predecessor to Lake Erie extended from here to Fort Wayne, Indiana. It turned out to be great farmland, but as we all know, wetlands are precious beyond measure.

I sort of got tired of seeing great blue herons. I mean, they are like the pigeons in downtown Cincinnati!

All of the male red-winged blackbirds were sitting in the middle of his territory, barking at anyone who would listen.

Double-crested cormorants...the "Canada geese" of western Lake Erie. This guys have enjoyed a boom in population after the effects of DDT almost wiped them out (along with lots of other waterfowl and raptors). They are now so numerous, they are booting herons from nesting sites.

A lesser yellowlegs. Ever tried to ID sandpipers? It's like nailing Jell-O to a wall. Tricky and slippery. But a few good field guides help. And a sunroof you can stand up in, too.

Greater and lesser yellowlegs.
The greater was a lifer. I was a lot farther away than it looks.
Somewhere in here, I also saw a solitary, but I couldn't get a good picture of it. Another lifer.

A dunlin! Lifer!

A powwow of dunlins!

More of the reserve.
The auto tour winds its way through the reserve on dusty gravel roads, about 2 miles worth.
It's so diverse, it's possible to see just about anything. Warblers, ducks, geese, swans, sandpipers, swallows, herons, cranes...

...and BEAVERS!!!!!!!!
How about that? A wet beaver.
Go ahead and laugh. You know you want to.

Isn't he cute? He swam right towards my car, nibbling the water as he went.
(He wasn't carrying the stick...that was just sticking out of the water)



The cherry on top of my birding sundae:
A bald eagle nest. Right in the same tree that I got my life bald eagle last year.
And to add to this serendipitous event, Bill Thompson took this picture in April. The same place. The same TREE, for chrissakes. That, my friends, is the definition of kismet.

So, my trip list in no particular order:
Bald eagle
Red-tailed hawk
Turkey vultures
Black vultures
Canada geese
Mallards
Blue-winged teals
Great blue herons
Great egrets
Pied-billed grebes
American coots
Lesser yellowlegs
Greater yellowlegs*
Dunlins*
Solitary sandpipers*
Ruddy turnstones*
Killdeer
Red-winged blackbirds
Purple martins
Bank swallows
Tree swallows
Rough-winged swallows*
Barn swallows
Woodcocks*
Herring gulls
Ring-billed gulls
Bonaparte's gulls
Double-crested cormorants
Canada warbler*
Yellow warbler
Bay-breasted warbler*
Chestnut-sided warbler
Mourning warbler*
Black and white warblers
American redstarts
Black-throated blue warblers*
Black-throated green warblers
Wilson's warblers
Magnolia warblers
Common yellowthroats
Northern parulas
Lincoln's sparrows
White-throated sparrows
Song sparrows
Ruby-crowned kinglets
Baltimore oriole
Gray catbirds
Eastern kingbird
Veery*
Ovenbird*
Rose-breasted grosbeaks
Mourning doves
American robins
American crows
Common grackles
American goldfinches
European starlings (bleeeech!)


So, that's 56 different species, and 11 lifers.
Not bad for 2 days, eh?

Dial-ups, go get a pizza. This could take awhile.

Ahhhh...my favorite sign in the whole world:

Today was awesome. All together, I saw 44 species, of which 8 were lifers. I wasn't sure what I had seen before (eBird is a great tool...it remembers what you can't). I was a tiny bit disappointed when I counted that it was only 8 lifers, but I have another day tomorrow to make the list grow.

My best moment today: A woodcock.


Well, maybe it was when I saw a second one....

No...seeing the third one was the greatest.


Barn swallows (and every other kind of swallow) are very common up here.

Black and white warbler.
They remind me of nuthatches, the way they hang upside down, surfing the trees.

Bay-breasted warbler

Baltimore oriole
This one's for Geoff. It's one of his favorites.

Look closely...there's a female black-throated blue warbler right in the middle...

...and here's her spouse. Goofy thing wouldn't turn around!

Black-throated green warbler

Catbirds are another common bird here.
Meow!

The best shot I could get of this Wilson's warbler.

Veery, very cool.

This rube-crowned kinglet was about two feet away. He sat there preening and fussing. I left before he did! Weird for a kinglet!

I missed these last year...a ruddy turnstone!

Hmmm...a dead double-crested cormorant.

This one's for Mary: A stinker! (Otherwise known as a great blue heron...you see them around every corner here.)

Bad picture of a lifer...an ovenbird!!!!
I'm proud of this one. Along the trail, all you have to do is stop when you see a crowd and someone will point out the bird they are watching. But I found the ovenbird for everyone!



This kingbird stood guard at the entrance to the first leg of the trail.



Rose-breasted grosbeak, eating a little green worm.

And finally, a very bad shot of a chestnut-sided warbler.
Tomorrow, I hope to squeeze in the auto tour of Ottawa NWR and a boat ride over to Put-In-Bay.
Now, onto the HOT TUB!