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Archive for the ‘Birds’ Category

Weekly Photo Challenge: Ready

Posted in Birds, Favorite Places, Travel, Uncategorized, Weekly Photo Challenge, tagged , , , , , , , on February 13, 2012| 8 Comments »

 “Life is an opportunity, benefit from it. Life is beauty, admire it. Life is bliss, taste it. Life is a dream, realize it. Life is a challenge, meet it. Life is a duty, complete it. Life is a game, play it. Life is a struggle, accept it. Life is tragedy, confront it. Life is an adventure, dare it. Life is luck, make it. Life is life, fight for it.” – Mother Teresa 

A Canada goose READY for take off at Farragut State Park in Northern Idaho. -- Photo by Pat Bean

 

Bean’s Pat: Martina’s Design Studio: Gone Too Far To Turn Back. http://photosbymartina.wordpress.com/ Words to live by.

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40-Acre Lake and Coots Galore

Posted in Birds, Favorite Hikes, Favorite Places, Nature, Travels With Maggie, tagged , , , , on February 11, 2012| 7 Comments »

“I never was one for rushing through a country. I like to take my time breathe the air, get the feel of it. I like to smell it, taste it get it located in my brain. The thing to remember when traveling is that the trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast and you miss all you travel for. “ Louis L’Amore

A coot and a turtle inspect each other. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

The mile and a half walk around 40-Acre Lake at Brazos Bend State Park is one of my favorites. While I’ve walked it many times, each time around is different.

Some days the stroll to the observation tower is filled with black-bellied whistling ducks. On other days its egrets and herons that dominate the shallow shore line and swampy wetlands.

Brilliant common yellowthroats like to hide in the reeds, and a northern harrier or two can usually be seen circling in the sky above. One day I had to turn around because the path ahead was lined by huge alligators. I had Maggie that day and I decided I didn’t want her to become just a tasty morsel for those toothy jaws, not to mention that I didn’t want to become dinner either.

Observation tower midway along the hike around 40-Acre Lake. -- Photo by Pat Bean

This past week, it was the coots that dominated the lake. While not the most glamorous of birds, I love watching them. On this day, perhaps because I felt I was one with nature as I had the trail all to myself on this off-season, week-day, the coots let me get close enough to see the glow in their red eyes.

Bean’s Pat: The Fairy Tale Asylum: My Miss Havisham

 http://thefairytaleasylum.wordpress.com/ It’s Margaret Michell’s Scarlet O’Hara for me. I had read the book, “Gone With the Wind.” four times by the time I was 12.

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A Morning Walk Around a Lake With the Vultures

Posted in Birds, Favorite Hikes, Favorite Places, Lakes, Nature, Travels With Maggie, tagged , , , , on February 7, 2012| 9 Comments »

 “As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.” Stephen Graham, “The Gentle Art of tramping.”

Black vultures claimed the deck that jutted into Creekfield Lake -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

Come. Take a walk with me around Creekfield Lake at Brazos Bend State Park. Bring your binoculars and camera.

It’s a cool, gray morning here at the park, where Maggie and I are spending a couple of days to hike and bird-watch.

The walk begins, continues and ends with cawing crows and dee-dee-deeing chickadees providing background music. Their not unpleasant cacophony is occasionally punctuated by the rat-a-tat-tat of a downy woodpecker.

I was surprised at how close this great blue heron let me get before it flew off. -- Photo by Pat Bean

I was surprised at how close this great blue heron let me get before it flew off. -- Photo by Pat Bean

The robins, titmouses, warblers and mockingbirds also occasionally add a note or two to the melody.

There’s a sign at the beginning of the loop around the lake that says “Don’t feed or molest the alligators.” You can be assured I won’t. I hope someone told the alligators not to molest the hikers. At least Maggie wouldn’t be their dinner. I left her back in the RV after taking her for an earlier morning walk.

Near the swampy, dark-water shore, three white-ibis are feeding. In deeper water, common moorhens are holding a large meeting, their shrill, screeching making it sound as if a dispute is going on.

But by far the most numerous bird I see this day is the black vulture. They have claimed a small island in the lake, many trees, a deck that juts into the water, the top of the park observatory and even the paved trail. They wait until I am almost upon them before they move, then only reluctantly and only to the closest tree, where they sit and watch me pass beneath them.

It’s a bit eerie, but not discomforting. I know they prefer dead things for dinner and I am very much alive.

That the vultures didn’t budge until I was almost upon them didn’t surprise me. The lone great blue heron that let me get closer than normal before flying off did surprise me. They usually fly at the first appearance of a human.

I had the trail to myself, and I was constantly lingering to look about at everything about me, the lingering red leaf, the mushrooms growing on a fallen tree, the feather floating in the water.

A small bench nicely situated beneath a large live-oak tree beckons to me. I sit and soon am being entertained by a small flock of bluebirds that just happen to be passing by. When they move on, I get up to follow. The bluebirds stick together in male and female pairs and I decide they are courting. As I watch a crow flies to a nearby tree with a stick in its beak. I assume it’s for starting a nest.

All too soon, I’ve completed the walk around the lake. What a great morning.

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Favorite Places: Pine Island, Florida

Posted in Birds, Favorite Places, Travel, Travels With Maggie, Writing, tagged , , , , , on February 6, 2012| 8 Comments »

“All things share the same breath – the beast, the tree, the man … the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.” Chief Seattle

Travels With Maggie

If you want to see wood storks, Pine Island is the place to go. One of these, perhaps the same one, sat in the top of the tree that help shade my RV from the Florida sun. -- Photo by Pat Bean

I spent a month on Pine Island, exploring such nearby places as the west side of the Everglades, Audubon’s Corkscrew Sanctuary and Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, which were all wonderful places.

But if I wanted to see birds, which of course I always want to do, all I had to do was look out my RV window.

I was especially fond of the word storks that haunted the Dumpster area of the large RV park where I stayed. The also visited me and Maggie at our RV site.

Bean’s Pat: Ruthless Scribblings: 12 (and a half) rules for writing http://tinyurl.com/7bmd3d7 Some good things for writers to remember.

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Thankfulness: A Habit I Try to Exercise Daily

Posted in Birds, Nature, Travels With Maggie, tagged , , , , , , on February 1, 2012| 12 Comments »

 “Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.” William Faulkner

Travels With Maggie

A misty morning in Zion National Park also let my imagination roam free. -- Photo by Pat Bean

When I stepped outside with Maggie this morning, the landscape was heavy with wet, gray fog. It felt like I had stepped back in time to the Land of the Lost. My imagination could even picture a dinosaur emerging from between the two large, moss-laden live oak trees that sit in the park across from where my RV is parked. The fog was that thick.

I was glad it was just my imagination that took me back in time because I am most grateful for the age in which I was born.

I first thought about this when I heard the story of my mother almost dying from diphtheria, a disease that took many children before the 20th century was out of its teens. If not diphtheria, then it was polio, measles or even mumps, all diseases for which there are now vaccines. It was a rare family back then that didn’t lose at least one child.

The thought of that, after I had my own children, was just too horrible to think about.

As the years went by, the miracle of vaccines was joined by the miracle of automatic washing machines to replace the scrub boards and wringer washers which I saw my grandmother and mother use every Monday.

Other time-saving devices freed women even more, well until they joined the work force and found themselves, at least the women of my generation, both bringing home the bacon and continuing as full-time homemakers without help.

Lake's End Park, Morgan, Louisiana: The landscape and cormorants here have a Lost World look about them. Don't you agree? -- Photo by Pat Bean

Thankfully, my granddaughters won’t put up with male partners who don’t change diapers or wash at least a dish or two.

The past 10 years, meanwhile, have brought another modern miracle. The Internet.

While I lived my life mostly without it, I can’t imagine going back to such a time. I love being connected to the world, being able to find an answer to a question within minutes and the new friends it’s brought me.

I try, each day, to find something to be thankful for in my life. Today, I’m grateful it was only my imagination that took me back to a time before labor-saving devices, vaccines and of course Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and plentiful books to enrich my life.

What do you value most that your ancestors didn’t enjoy?

Bean’s Pat: Portrait of Wildflowers: Seasonal Leaf Color http://tinyurl.com/82gq8np Everything you ever wanted to know about wildflowers. This is a great blog for someone like me who wants to know the name of everything in nature.

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Favorite Places: Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge

Posted in Birds, Books, Favorite Places, Nature, Travels With Maggie, tagged , , , , , on January 30, 2012| 4 Comments »

 “Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.” – Terry Tempest Williams

Travels With Maggie

Yellow-headed blackbirds are common sights at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. -- Photo by Pat Beans

I first visited the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge east of the Great Salt Lake in Northern Utah in the 1970s. It was lush with vegetation and full of twittering birds.

Then came the early 1980s, when the lake reached a historical high and its briny waters took out roads, causeways and buried the refuge. It killed all the sanctuary’s green-growing plants and took out the visitor center as a warning of Mother Nature’s fickleness. .

It took a long time for the refuge to recharge itself, a period in which Terry Tempest Williams wrote “Refuge,” a book published in 1991 that was written when Williams’ mother was dying. The book weaves the landscape of the refuge and nature into a tangled web with the author’s struggle to come to grips with her own life. A very good read, in case you’re interested.

Another common refuge inhabitant is the snowy egret. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Since both the refuge and I existed at that time in the shadows of the Wasatch Mountains, the refuge drew me to it – often. I enjoyed its quiet sanctuary from the chaotic and stressful world of journalism, and also wrote about the refuge’s recovery for my newspaper readers.

I still vividly remember the first green-growing thing that returned. It was pickleweed, a salt loving plant that would help heal the soil for other plants. Those tiny nubs of green poking up seemed like a miracle.

Today, the refuge,is once again lush and a thriving habitat for birds and other wildlife. It’s there for anyone willing to endure a drive down a 10-mile, bumpy unpaved road from Interstate 15.

Maggie and I’ve driven the slow-going, rough miles several times in Gypsy Lee, who shakes, rattles and rolls over the bumpier spots. She’s used to such detours, however, and so far has not complained.

For those less passionate nature lovers, there is now a new Visitor’s Center just a few hundred yards off the freeway. It was built there instead of on the refuge proper just in case Mother Nature decided to get a wild hair again.

It’s really a nice center, with a created wetlands through which a boardwalk winds to give visitors a chance to see Mother Nature at her best. If you’re ever in Northern Utah, you might like to check it out. Perhaps you’d even like to take the 10-mile bumpy drive.

Bean’s Pat: Travel Photography: Most Unexpected Rainbow http://tinyurl.com/867pogm Have you ever seen a full rainbow? I haven’t. But this photographer did.

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Favorite Places: Wildlife Refuges

Posted in Birds, Favorite Places, Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , on January 29, 2012| 6 Comments »

“It is our task in our time and in our generation to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours.” – John F. Kennedy

A Family of Tundra Swans

A family of Tundra Swans at Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Southeast Idaho. -- Photo by Pat Bean

 

Bean’s Pat: Chicks With Ticks: Stream of Consciousness http://tinyurl.com/6rkn8ss All about the chicks and their passion for Mother Nature’s wilder side. .

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Travels With Maggie: The Beginning

Posted in Birds, Journeys, Travels With Maggie, tagged , , , , on January 27, 2012| 13 Comments »

 “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”–Neale Donald Walsch

Here’s How It All Began

Balcony House: Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado. Not only have my travels taken me all across the country, they have also taken me back in time. -- Photo by Pat Bean

It was a sunny day in 2004, just three weeks before I would retire from a 37-year career as a journalist, when I drove a brand new RV off an Ogden, Utah, sales lot. It felt like the butterflies in my stomach had developed thorns on their fragile wings.

Everything that had been a part of my past life was about to change. I had just blocked off all chances of remaining rooted in my small, but cozy home that sat in the shadows of the Wasatch Mountains I loved. There simply was not enough money in my future to both fulfill my lifelong dream of living and traveling on the road while maintaining fixed roots within a circle of friends that had taken over 20 years to acquire.

This day I had not only chosen the unknown road that lay ahead, but had wrapped my choice in cement. I had even traded in my Honda Odyssey as part payment for the undersized, 22-foot RV that was now my only form of transportation, and soon would be my only home.
By the time all the paper work giving me title to the 2004 Volkswagen Vista/Winnebago had been scrutinized, signed and finalized, it was early evening. I was too unsettled to take my purchase for a check-out spin. So, feeling tall and strange sitting behind the wheel with my new living, dining, sleeping, cooking and bathroom facilities behind me, I drove home. Emotional turmoil, good or bad, always sapped my energy.

When Maggie and I began our travels, her muzzle was still solid black. -- Photo by Pat Bean

On carefully pulling into my driveway, testing the wideness needed to turn my new RV, I heard frenzied barking from inside the house. It was how my dog, Maggie, reacted to the sound of strange vehicles invading her territory. She never barked when I returned home, nor did she at any of my frequent visitors. But she did not recognize this new vehicle.
When I opened the door, Maggie gave me a quizzical look of surprise. Then, realizing in a split second that something new was parked in the driveway, she dashed between my legs and ran out to explore.

I opened the RV’s side door and she eagerly hopped in. She slowly sniffed every surface she could get at, then finally hopped up onto the couch and gave me a look that I easily interpreted as: So where are we going? To explore America, the beautiful, I reply. I always answer my dog’s inquiring looks. .

And that’s how my travels with Maggie began. It’s been a journey that’s covered over 125,000 miles and heading into its eighth year.  I have nary a regret.

*This post was published today as part of Story Circle Network’s One Woman’s Day blog at: http://tinyurl.com/5tevft5  

Bean’s Pat: Birding on the Cheap: Rio Grande Valley http://tinyurl.com/riograndebirds Great birding blog with photos about a  place to escape for the winter.

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Technology Miracles and Boo-Boos

Posted in Birds, Books, Favorite Places, Nature, Travels With Maggie, tagged , , , , , , , on January 26, 2012| 6 Comments »

“If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

I found Estero Llano State Park in Welasco, Texas, the old-fashioned-way, with a map. I'm not sure how the anhinga found its way here. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

I was in Dallas, returning from taking my daughter to work so I could use her car for the day. All I had to do to get back home was follow the GPS map installed on the dashboard of her Toyota Highlander.

But I decided I wanted to get a different view of the map. Silly me. As I’m sure you have already guessed, I pressed the wrong button and lost everything on the screen — and couldn’t get it back.

Because I had depended solely on the GPS to get me from one place to the next, I was confusingly lost with morning rush-hour traffic zooming all around me.

I was fortunate that I eventually came to a landmark I recognized and, although it took an extra 40 minutes, I did eventually get back to my daughter’s house.

I then used a map, and my own handcrafted cheat-sheet of right and left turns, to complete the day’s errands and to find my place back to pick up my daughter from work later that day.

The truth is that I’ve had to be pulled, while screaming, into most technological changes. I was one of the last to finally get a cell phone, and it was only this past Christmas, and only because it was a gift from my son, that I got a “smart” phone.

On the other hand, I was one of the first to get a home computer. After using one at work to write my newspaper stories, I found using a typewriter for my personal writings impossible.

Without GPS, Monarch butterflies, like this one I found at Quintana Neotropic Bird Sanctuary on Texas' Gulf Coast, migrate annually between Mexico and Canada, although it may take three generations to complete the journey. -- Photo by Pat Bean

My first computer didn’t even have a hard drive. Everything ran from floppy disks. And the word-processing program on it came with a black screen and green type, or you could make the type orange.

Today, I can’t imagine life without my computer and the Internet. Such a thought sounds barbaric.

Ditto life without my Kindle, which was also a gift and which I’ve now had for a year. I thought I would miss the feel of a real book in my hand, but I haven’t. I think the fact I can be reading almost any book I want almost instantly is a miracle – well until I discover how much I’ve spent at Amazon each month.

I still haven’t got a GPS, however. My canine traveling companion, Maggie, and I still use maps, albeit it computer ones, to find our way across the country.  It seems a GPS might be as difficult for me to use as an electric can opener, which is why I still use a manual one. 

But I’ve got a Twitter account, maggieandpat. And when I announced it, my oldest granddaughter laughed and said: “Who would have thought it would take my Nana to make me get a Twitter account?” 

Her comment made this wandering/wondering old broad feel young – well at least until a pain in one of my joints announced a change in the weather.

Bean’s Pat: Vimeo: My Friend Maia by Julie Warr http://vimeo.com/31733784 A video to inspire all us old broads, and perhaps those still young among us, too.

 

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Yellowstone and Antelope Island, Where the Buffalo* Roam

Posted in Birds, Favorite Places, Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , on January 21, 2012| 2 Comments »

 “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” – Crowfoot saying.

Favorite Places

Author Bob Sanchez http://bobsanchez1.blogspot.com/commented that he

One of my favorite shots of an American bison is this one of the large animal taking a dust bath on Antelope Island, which is one of my favorite places. -- Photo by Pat Bean

liked yesterday’s photo of the bison mother and nursing calf that stopped traffic in South Dakota’s Custer State Park. As an aside he noted that since these lumbering creatures can be dangerous, he was glad I took the photo through the windshield of my RV, Gypsy Lee.

His cautionary words jogged one of my brain wires to replay, in vivid detail, an incident back in the 1970s that involved my then 10-year-old daughter, Trish. She, I and my son, Mike, were visiting Yellowstone, where we had stayed the night in the Old Faithful Inn.

Antelope Island bison with a view of the Wasatch Mountains on the far side of Great Salt Lake. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Antelope Island bison with a view of the Wasatch Mountains on the far side of Great Salt Lake. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Back then, there was a small cafe located adjacent to the Inn, where the three of us had breakfast. Trish finished first and asked if she could go outside and look around.

“Stay close,” I said in my mother’s voice.

When Mike and I went outside about 10 minutes later, my heart stopped. While Trish hadn’t gone far, she was standing beside a huge bison that had settled down on some warm sand – and was petting it.

Along with bison, chukars are easy to find on Antelope Island. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Thankfully her guardian angel was looking over her. Not only did she escape without harm from the wooly creature, her mother was too relived she was safe to punish her.

My travels the past seven years have often taken me in sight of these great animals that once roamed across North America’s grasslands in great herds before we humans killed them to the brink of extinction. Perhaps it’s because they were so rare for so long that many people today get so excited when they see one.

I was fortunate that before I retired and left Ogden, Utah, I saw them regularly on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake.

I used the island, which has a high claim on my long list of favorite North American places, as my Birding 101 Lab. That’s the thing about being a birder. If you’re looking for tiny things, you’ll never miss all the big ones.

*While we may call this creature a buffalo which I did in yesterday’s blog because it is a term everyone understands, the animal that is found in North America is a bison, an American bison to be specific.

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