Monday, November 17

This past weekend was a birding/food fest kind of weekend. Friday night our friend Joanna came down from Marquette out of the first U.P blizzard of the year. Saturday morning we headed out for our ultimate goal; Jasper-Pulaski Fish and Wildlife Area in Indiana. Or JP as it’s known in birding circles.

First we hit Pokagon State Park for a quick visit with Fred at the nature center and a short hike. If you ever want to see some really fat squirrels check out the ones at Fred’s “bird” feeding area. These guys are in real need an exercise plan.

After Pokagon we drifted over to JP by way of the Indiana Amish area. Stopped for lunch in Middlebury at Das Essen Haus. It’s a huge Amish/Mennonite restaurant with a choice of buffet, family style, or menu dining. We opted out of the gorge yourself senseless options and went the menu route. Food was good and plenty of it. Desert was even more fun. Lise got shoe-fly pie and I had mincemeat pie. Made with mincemeat that actually had meat in it. Almost made me think I was back home. After the meal we finally waddled our way to JP for one of the big birding spectacles in the mid-west.

JP is a major stopover site for sandhill cranes. Something on the order of 90% of the eastern sandhill crane population passes through JP during the winter migration to the southeast. It’s possible to get 15,000 – 20,000 cranes there at one time. During the day they forage in the farm fields around JP and during the night they roost in a wetland on the property. At dawn and dusk they congregate in a 300-acre area called Goose Pasture. Imagine watching and listening to thousands of cranes at one time. This is moving. You would have to be a pretty hard core Republican to not appreciate this. People come pretty good distances to see it too. There were buses from Illinois and Minneapolis while we were there. Molly said that Lyman-Briggs, her MSU residential collage, was planning to run a trip.

Next on the agenda was Bartlett’s Gourmet Grill in Beverly Shores. Really small place with plain cement floors but great food. We got lucky because of the time change. We thought it was 6:00 but it was actually 5:00 there. So we didn’t have any wait. Right after us the place packed. Fun place to eat but I suspect the dinner rush hour would not be the time to come.

We stayed in the area Saturday night and hit Indiana Dunes State park in the morning. Always fun to walk through the area where Henry Cowles came up with the idea of ecological succession. After that we headed home with a lunch stop at Annie’s in New Buffalo and finished the day meeting friends at a new Mexican restaurant in East Lansing. Now it’s back to gruel to atone for our epicurean spree.

Good friends, good eating, good birding. Don’t get much better than that. Probably what the cranes are thinking too.