Greetings from a Quality Inn in St. Ignace, Michigan, just
over the Mighty Mac bridge to the Upper Peninsula. Where there’s no place with
decent coffee open or scrapple open. I am up here on a quest to find bats
coming out of hibernation. More on that later.
It’s been a busy time for us. We continue to live
vicariously through our daughter. Molly had water polo tournaments the past two
weekends. The weekend of April 9 we were down in Columbus Ohio for an invitational
tournament. The tournament went well and Columbus is always a fun place to
visit. The area around the OSU campus is fun and there’s a Graeters Ice Cream
store close by.
Molly pumps.
She shoots.
She scores!
Graeters. Black raspberry chocolate chip to die for. Almost as good as
scrapple.
Then this past weekend was the Big 10 conference
championship in Ann Arbor. In a cliff hanger game they came in second, losing the
championship by one goal to perennial champions University of Michigan. And we
got to hit the Washtenaw Dairy Store, an ice cream tradition in Ann Arbor.
Being the first really warm weekend we have had there was a line coiled through
the store and out the door.
Washtenaw Dairy Store.Try the Black Cherry.
But the season is now over so we have to make our own
entertainment. With the temperatures turning nice we packed some sandwiches for
dinner and went up to Maple River Game Area Friday afternoon. We got some new
birds for the year including greater yellowleg, pintail, shoveler, green-winged
teal, blue-winged teal, wood duck, widgeon, and rough-winged swallow. You can
tell it’s courtin’ time. Everyone is in their spring breeding plumage and
looking quite sharp. Even the birds with the same plumage all year round, like
the song sparrows, look just a little sharper in the spring.
Other things are popping out too. We found a painted turtle
that looked like it just crawled out of a long slumber in the mud. Maybe not
too pretty but a welcome sight none the less.
When we got back from Ann Arbor on Saturday night I managed
to sneak in a little frog time at Barb and Ellen’s wetland. Some wood frogs
still calling but mostly spring peepers. These little guys are tough to
photograph. They are only about the size of your thumbnail and are quite
skittish. Which makes sense when you’re the size of a thumbnail. Even in the
daytime they are difficult to see. At night you have to track them by their
call. It takes some patience, sitting in the water and slowly inching up on
them. You move a little, they stop calling. Then you wait another five or ten
minutes and they start calling again. You move a little closer and they quiet
down again. You wait another five or ten minutes and they call again….. You
repeat the process until you can get close to try a picture. And then they flip
away with a little splash while you’re trying to focus. While they may be small,
they are very loud. When you do get close to them while they’re calling, the decibel
level starts hitting the threshold for pain.
Spring peepers making their “Hey Baby” noise.
So yesterday I was reminded of the volatility of weather
patterns around big water. Especially in more northern latitudes. For the past couple weeks I’ve been tracking
the weather in St. Ignace, looking for a warming trend that would bring bats
out of hibernation. Because the bats may leave the area after hibernation, it’s
critical to be monitoring when they first come out of hibernation to
demonstrate if the cave is a hibernacula or not.
Last Friday the pattern looked like temperatures would be
above 50 degrees Fahrenheit Thursday or Friday
of this week. Plenty of time to do the Big 10 tournament and get everything
ready for my monitoring. Then while we were at the tournament on Sunday, a
pleasant 80 degrees in Ann Arbor, the St. Ignace temperatures shot up to 65
degrees. And the trend showed it well above 50 degrees all week. So I quickly
packed, ran to campus to get the gear, finished some work Monday morning, and
headed north about noon Monday.
Well, I was lied to. It was in the 70s down in the Lansing
area. When I got up here the temperature was in the high 40s, and it was cloudy
and windy. Last night the trend showed it above 50 degrees Tuesday and
Wednesday, then dropping to the 40s for a week. But hey, that was 12 hours ago.
Now the temperature trend shows it hitting the 60s for at least a week. If this
is to be believed I should have enough time here to sample both the restaurants
that are open until the tourist season starts. Neither of which has scrapple.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 