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!

North Dakota at its Best

A marsh wren winds out his clattery wooden song. Could his tail be cocked any higher?

An American bittern hauls his neck and legs around the prairie.

Hi guys! I'm finally taking a little time to prep some posts from North Dakota. She showed very well this spring, exchanging bright sunshine and shirtsleeve weather for the horizontal blowing snow she hammered us with last June. Those of you who read this blog know to expect some NoDak posts every year, since Bill and I have been headlining the Potholes and Prairies festival for what? Seven years now? We speak, we sing, we lead trips, we show a lot of people a lot of cool life birds. It's (part of) a living, and loads of fun.

I didn't take many photos this year--we were just too busy getting festivalgoers on birds to do much photography. Just for nice, Bill set me up with the sweetest carbon-fiber tripod for my Swarovski compact scope, so I was totin' that and digging getting people killer looks at life birds. So my photos are kind of a grab-bag which I will more or less successfully attempt to weave into a narrative. Heh. Less successfully, for sure.

We really focused on bringing some North Dakota hospitality and food to the festival goers this spring, in addition to fabulous checkoffs for their life lists (Baird's sparrow, Sprague's pipit, American bittern, yellow rail, black tern, marbled godwit, gray partridge, ferruginous hawk and the like). After searching all day long--Bill's Big Day-- for gray partridge, we found a little covey walking around in a used equipment lot right in Carrington as we packed it in for the day! Gray partridge, like ring-necked pheasant, is a naturalized exotic species in North Dakota, but the birding powers that be hath decreed it a countable species.

Back to cultcha-- one of my trips was called Pipits and Pies. We hit the diners, boy, and I will never forget the rhubarb coffee cake lightly dusted with powdered sugar that we enjoyed in Woodworth. Oh my goodness. It was gone before I could get a picture.

Bill and I have been working on festival organizers for years to abandon the boxed lunches and treat the participants to real North Dakota hospitality. This year, it happened. We ate in the cafe's. No ham sandwiches, no apple, no Otis Spunkmeyer cookie. Real food. After a long morning of birding, there is nothing like a noontime Smorgasbord (referred to simply as a Smorg).

Knoephla soup, roast pork, masheds, salad, and a fluffy grandma-ey concoction of mandarin oranges, coconut, Miracle Whip and Cool Whip. At least that's how I sussed it out. It was more than delicious.

The thing I love about getting in the small-town cafes is that we get to talk to local people, and impress on them that we're all here gobbling up their smorg because they have such fantastic birds and wildlife. They are usually amazed that anyone would travel to their lonely part of the planet to see sparrows. I enjoy soaking in the stares as we troop in, and then announcing loudly, "Look out! The birdwatchers are here! Hide your knoephlas!" After an introduction like that, we wind up talking to them, and explaining what we're all about. Kind of a grassroots eco-tourism approach.

And the food is out of this world.

The Robinson cafe, groaning under the weight of happy birders.

Main Street, Robinson, North Dakota, looking north.

And Main Street, Robinson, looking south, a view that never fails to put a lump in my throat.

These little towns hang on on the wide and heedless prairie.

Rainbow Dog

Phoebe and Liam love to create art on our sidewalk and driveway. Being 14, Phoebe is drawn to creating intricate patterns whose painstaking tediousness suits her brain organization just now. I remember drawing those by the hour. Now I do everything else by the hour, and everything I do has a point and a goal. Sigh. I miss being 14. At least I get to watch Phoebe get to be 14.

The kids tend to create their best pieces when someone is due to visit. Since we've had a cavalcade of visitors all spring and summer, we've had a lot of sidewalk art.

Ah, but sidewalks are to be walked upon, aren't they, Chet Baker?

Yes, they are. And I am just the dog to do it. Is there a problem with that?

Oh, don't walk on my picture when it's rainy and wet, Chet! You'll ruin my perfect design!!


Perfect is perfect, but perfect isn't very interesting. This is a sidewalk, and people are supposed to use it.

Not only will I walk across your design with wet pawdypads, I will stand on it, too.



And if you keep pestering me about it, I will sit on it.

Like this.


And you, Miss Phoebe, should know by now that some of the best art

is created by accident.
Or when other people give you ideas. People like me.


And I, Chet Baker, am here to teach you this important lesson on this moist summer day.


And rainbows shine out of my bottom, also, if you have not noticed.


It's true, Chet Baker. My painting is much better now. Thank you, All-Knowing Dog. I love you.

I love you, too, Phoebe.

For a daily dose of your favorite dog, follow Chet Baker on Facebook!

And come see me this weekend at the 2d annual Midwest Native Plant Conference at Bergamo Environmental Education Center in Dayton. I speak Saturday night, August 7. Native plants for sale, field trips with the incomparable Jim McCormac, fabulous talks (Wil Hershberger on insect song) and even Susan with her raptors!