Happy Birthday, Red Angel

Happy birthday, Red Angel. I'm going to take you back to North Dakota, because we had such fun there, and because you still had all six wisdom teeth when we were there in June. I figured you would want to see photos of yourself just as the Lord made you.

You are an excellent driver (of golf carts). Even though Al Batt doesn't look so sure, Ann and Ernie Hoffert trusted you, and so did I. I would ride in a golf cart with you anywhere. I think that's about the happiest I've seen you in a long time, tooling around in a golf cart as the sun sank in the prairie sky, throwing your head back and laughing.

I love to watch you discover nature. You field a giant puffball tossed your way without squealing and dropping it. I like that. Maybe you wouldn't eat it if I cooked it up, but you get points for catching it.

You are a creative girl, a girl happy to leave mysteries for others to decipher. If there even are any others out here.

You are kind to animals (even ones that don't match your color scheme)

and to your little brother, and he loves you endlessly for that.

You are becoming a true connoisseur of food and eating establishments both humble and grand. And you show the makings of a pretty good cook, too. You're fun to be with

and highly attractive to strangers. Strangers have the best candy.

Almost most important of all, you're hilarious, and being hilarious is a prerequisite in this family. 

Did I say you're beautiful, too? Oh, sorry. 

Happy birthday, Beautiful. The white lilacs pale beside you.

Thanks to Ann and Ernie Hoffert for the magical gift of prairie places, their glorious gardens, and their friendship. 

Prairie Dogs and Mule Deer

One of our favorite spots at Theodore Roosevelt National Park: a place called Buck Hill. It's hard to beat the view from the top.
We feel compelled to photograph each other at the modest summit (There really aren't any mountains in North Dakota).

The kids love to shelter under a ledge and pretend they're hunter/gatherers, looking for dinner, building a fire, flensing skins, perhaps.

Dinner is everywhere--mule deer are plentiful.

It's a great place for wildlife photography. You're largely ignored, and the tableaux are stunning.


The biggest bull bison are often solitary, like this one. Imagine yourself on that winding road, passing from vision to vision. That's TRNP, at dusk in June.

A spotted towhee rasps out its song against the badland backdrop.

We round a corner to find a mother prairie dog and her three exclamation point babies!!!

They wondered why this woman was groaning...

never realizing that they and their tiny hands might be the cause

Three perfect little sod poodles in the slanting light of an endless June evening.

Ferruginous Hawk and Extraneous Silliness

For us, North Dakota is a pastiche of great people, wonderful birds, quietly stunning grass and skyscapes, and pure silliness.

This is a Dakota Growers pasta Plant. (Thanks, Rick, for the ID.) This photo, taken through the windshield as I drove, doesn't even come close to showing how big this plant is. It is just huuuuge. North Dakota grows the best hard durum wheat which is the best for pasta since it has so much gluten in it. Those who are allergic to gluten probably shouldn't even look at this picture.


A classic mirage, the road disappearing into watery nothingness. You don't often see good mirages back East, though Westerners probably get used to them. We squealed and drove into the depths. The kids loved that. And then I loved trying to explain what a mirage is. One of those moments when the mom starts out confidently and then kind of trails off...it's outside my area of expertise. Something about a reflection of the sky onto the road caused by heat wave distortion, uh...anyway, it's a mirage.


I was pleased to find that Bill and I are not yet quite perfectly matched in a seesaw sense

and the kids have a bit of biomass to gain, too, before they can send Daddy flying.

Did I mention wonderful birds?

Well, here is one of the Most Wonderful North Dakota Birds: the ferruginous hawk.

We were flying along a highway when we spotted this enormous bird sitting on a low surveyor's marker.

He sat for quite awhile, then spread those magnificent wings, crouched and leapt up.

The light was worse than terrible, but we got an eyeful of this stunning almost-eagle

which I believe should be called the Rufescent Hawk-eagle, because I always think of the Ornate Hawk-eagle when I see it. Splendid Prairie Hawk-eagle would be a good name for it, too.

Look at those glorious red thighs, all that white in tail and wing.

Away he flapped, leaving us open mouthed, stunned.

A lot of birders on that bus had hoped against hope to glimpse a ferruginous hawk, but never dared dream of such a show.
I'm happy with these photos, even though it was dark as a dungeon that day and spitting rain. I love my Canon Digital Rebel XSi with its 70-300 image-stabilized telephoto lens.
I carry it everywhere without even feeling its weight, and hand-hold it for virtually all my grab shots of birds and butterflies, deer and giant otters. If you like what you see on my blog and want to upgrade your photo equipment, you can thank me by clicking these links when you're finally ready to buy. Direct sales from links on my blog send a very small kickback my way, and won't cost you a cent more.

That's North Dakota--always surprising, always a blast. If you're thinking of hitting the prairie in June 2011, check out the Potholes and Prairies Festival website. You may see someone rawther familiar there. And Bill, Phoebe, Liam and I would love to see you in Carrington, North Dakota in '11! You do not have to know anything about birdwatching to go to a birding festival and see fabulous birds. We take care of all that. That's what birding festivals are for. Just bring decent binoculars and a desire to be thrilled.

But wait. There's more! I'm in ad mode now. Don't worry, it'll pass soon.

My wonderful WebWitch has added another clickable feature to an already active blog homepage. Look in the right sidebar to find a mini photo-album of Chet Baker, poised right above a small donation button. As I creep up on five years of steady blogging for your viewing and reading pleasure, the pull of gainful activities (my next book) always on the yoke, I'm ready to find some ways to ask the blog to give a little back. My dream job would be just to run around and find fabulous things to photograph and share with you, but to date the dream job has been a volunteer position. And it's finally sunk in on me that it will remain so unless I do something about it. If I've learned anything about potential corporate sponsors, it's that they don't answer their mail.

This blog, thanks to my gifted and delightful WebWitch, is lively, fun and beautiful, and I don't want a bunch of ads for timeshares and diets and masculine enlargement products and Lord knows what else flashing away in the margins. But I do have to pay her to make it beautiful, keep developing it, and help me look like I know what I'm doing here on the Web. You all quietly and generously helped me through the rabies shot debacle. Then you helped my friend Debby as she rebuilds her life, post-tornado. I'll always be deeply grateful for your generosity. Heck, I'm grateful that you're here, reading, at all.

So there he is, Chet Baker with his little paw out, his Mether slowly feeling her way down the dark and twisty alley of monetizing her blog without wrecking it. A little stab at promoting Canon cameras here, an appeal there. Down the road, some unique products to sell, if my ideas pan out. Kept under the glass terrarium of natural history blogging, I doubt I'll ever be lucky enough to be one of those "pro-bloggers" you hear about. But I've been cobbling together a career since 1981, and it's bound to change shape over time. Maybe it'll all add up to something in time.

Too bad there is not a street corner we could sing on, Mether. Nobody would hear us on our street.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for your support.

What The Kids Did

If I have a favorite subject for photography, it's my kids. When Phoebe was a baby, I was shooting film, and I'd go once a week to Wal-Mart with a canister or two of film, and an hour later I'd get a stack of prints that would choke a hog. I miss those prints, so nice to hold in the hand, but I can't imagine having to curate as many photos as I take now, much less use chemicals to develop them and paper to print them.

She was pretty darned adorable.


Our kids' best memories live on a laptop now, and that works fine for us.

How do they amuse themselves when we're in North Dakota, with no television, no computers to speak of; just time and the wind and the grass?

They walk.


(Note Adventuring Sticks.)
There was a long period during Bill's Big Day when we tried to lure some recalcitrant yellow rails out of the thick grass and into our binocular view. It looked like this:

which by any measure is pretty darn boring, a bunch of people staring fixedly into the marsh like addled spaniels. If you don't really care to see a yellow rail, you're going to bug out of a scene like that pretty quickly.

While we searched, Phoebe and Liam went adventuring on a two-track road. One thing was sure: they wouldn't meet any vehicles.



When we're traveling, the kids are a seamless unit, turning to each other for fun and solace.

They laugh and play.

And they appreciate. They adored our evening at Dakota Sun Gardens. While we talked, they experienced the place, and then they ran and grabbed us and showed us every wonderful thing they'd found.

And when they miss Chet Baker, they find another animal to love, be it hugely pregnant barn cat

or supershiny, supersweet, supersized black Lab.

I think what I love most about them is how they take care of each other. They're a blessing and a joy.

And they are Ninjas, as evidenced by this rare action photo.

Birds, Barns, Cows and Gear

Here's a pile of gear--it's what Bill took with him every day on the bus. Mine was not much smaller. You can imagine what it's like stumbling around in the dark at 4 AM, making sure you have everything you'll need.

People look at our stacks of luggage in the airport, barely concealing their disdain for out excesses, and I want to say, "Hey! We're working here! It takes gear to show people good birds!"

Here's Ann Oliver's photo of me showing some folks their life Sprague's pipit.
But I don't say anything. I let them think all those suitcases hold my makeup, heels, creams, hairdryer, curling iron, gels, emollients, and diamond tennis bracelets, because that's certainly the impression I give, as dolled up and fabulous as I always am.


For instance, here's Bill using an iPod and speakers to try to bring a clicking yellow rail into view. Though everyone was patient and he tried for a very long time, the rails--and there were five or more--were content to click just out of sight. The day before, Bill and I had seen our life yellow rail in this spot as it lightfooted across the road right in front of our van! It ran, then flew, its body upright, its impossibly long toes dangling from greenish legs, then dropped into the marsh, never to be seen again. I still can't believe we saw a yellow rail, with no playback of its calls. It just appeared to us. I guess it was meant to be.

So because the birds sometimes hide, we amuse ourselves looking at other North Dakota life forms. I think these may be red Angus cattle. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. They look like Angus. Both red Angus and red Holsteins have finally gained favor after decades of culling because they were the "wrong" color.

People can be so arbitrary. And yet I have to admit that fawn-colored Boston terriers kind of bug me. They ought to be black or brindle red. Whatever these cattle are, they're certainly handsome mahogany red and rounded beasties.

North Dakota always inspires in Bill and me the most intense outbuilding envy. We have one outbuilding, the hardest-working four-car garage in Ohio. It is crammed to overflowing with two cars, four bikes, a lawn tractor, a Real Tractor, all my pots and potting soil, tools, bird houses, bird feeders, seed, feed of all descriptions, recycling...you can barely get to your car. So I dream of loading a few North Dakota granaries on a flatbed trailer and hauling them to Ohio, where they would probably promptly rot and fall down. But a girl can dream, can't she?

Two granaries, linked together to make a fabulous little conference room at Dakota Sun Gardens not far from Carrington.

And there are always the barns, the beautiful barns. I have my favorites, like this one with the licheny roof and the mostly gone paint.

I love this barn for its incredible beauty, but also because Say's phoebe's live here, and the grove behind it is just full of orioles and house wrens and bluebirds and yellowthroats. When I see these photos I hear their songs again. We take festivalgoers here for a hit of forest birds when they've seen enough grassland birds for awhile.

And what do the children do while we bird? They go adventuring (their own word for exploring). Liam makes sure they both have adventuring sticks, which makes them feel safer.

He packed their Ohio adventuring sticks in his luggage, and carried them all over North Dakota, and got them back to Ohio only to have Chet Baker chew them up when they were left on the lawn.

A stick on the lawn is fair game. Chewing sticks is a big part of my job.

And from Ann Oliver, who was there, some freshly baked comestibles at the Woodworth Diner. Mmm, mmm, good...

The fabulissimo Rhubarb Coffee Cake Square. It doesn't look that impressive, but oh my goodness it was delicious. Rumor has it that Lynne has a recipe. Hmmm, Linney? Wanna share this gooey goodness with the world?
One thing I can tell you: I am planting some rhubarb this fall. All the signs point to it.

I am excited. I get to stay home for a couple of weeks and paint now, in one of my favorite times of the year--late summer, when the insect music is an overwhelming swelling chorus, when everything is blooming its head off, when the hayrolls march across the fields and the bluebirds gather on the wires, when the warblers start slipping through the birches. Mmmm. See you around!