Sunday, May 5

Happy Cinco de Mayo.

Spring is officially here. Fat Boy, the world’s largest groundhog, has crawled out from under my neighbor’s shed. He spent the winter sleeping off a gut load of my garden tomatoes. He has risen and he’s looking for more. He doesn’t walk or run. His movement is more like a continuous wave of hairy fat, rolling across the landscape. Like a furry tidal wave, heading for my garden. I don’t know what he plans to live off of until I get the garden planted. Probably small children. They go up to pet the adorable creature and he pulls them in like Brer’ Fox’s tar baby.

Signs of spring – tree swallows.

Signs of spring – turkeys doing their hey baby strut.

Signs of spring – not much gaudier than a male wood duck.

SIgns of spring – toads doing their hey baby call.

Another sign of Spring is Fido’s digging craze. She loves being outside. Usually when we let her out, she gets her bearings then starts running in some direction. We let her go a distance then bring her back. She sits for a couple minutes, trying to fathom how she got back to the starting point. Then she takes off in the same direction again. Occasionally she’ll just wander around exploring, but usually she has a heading of interest. I’m heading south by southeast and get out of my way. But come spring, all she wants to do is dig. She scratches at the back door to get out. We let her out, she finds her happy place, and starts on a new trade route to China. This goes on for a couple weeks.

Heading for China under the patio. This was several hours of work.

Along with spring comes the big bird migration and girl’s water polo. Right now, water polo is winning. Last weekend (April 27 & 28) we had a two day tournament in Rockford. This past week there were home games Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday night. The week capped off with another overnight tournament in East Grand Rapids. Needless to say, birding has suffered.

Molly on the offensive.

Molly on the defense.

Molly doing the sprint at the start of the period. She won.

We have gotten some birding in though. On the Rockford trip Lise got a broad-winged hawk while driving at 70 mph. I was doing Suduko. I did get a broad-winged at Fenner Nature Center Thursday morning. I also got palm, Nashville, and yellow warblers the same day. Today at Fenner I got Swainson’s thrush and warbling vireo. While I was at Fenner, every other birder in the county was at Harris Nature Center, looking at a Kentucky warbler. I went chasing it later in the day without any luck. I did get a blue-winged warbler though, and my first dragonfly of the year, a common green darner.

That brings my Michigan total up to 138 and Lise’s up to 131. Lise is with her brother Stefan, birding in Delaware right now. My Michigan list may be higher than hers but I have a feeling her year list will be way better than mine. There are kinds of crazy things in Michigan right now. Kentucky warbler locally, Smith’s longspurs, Eurasian widgeon, eared grebe, Franklin’s gull, yellow-headed blackbird…….. Unfortunately serious chasing probably isn’t in the picture for the next week or so.

One other important thing to mention. In my last post I stated that we saw glossy ibis down at Erie Marsh. I misspoke.  They were white-faced ibis, not glossy ibis. A birding faux pas. For this they’ll probably make me count starlings on the Christmas Bird Count.