We spent last weekend with our friend Phyllis at her family
place near Charlevoix. The house is on a cliff overlooking Lake Michigan.
Complete with gin and tonics while enjoying beautiful sunsets from the deck. So
colonial and so pleasant.
This is a nice part of Michigan. Unlike where we live
there’s big water, some topography, and vistas.
This is Michigan’s wine country so we had to do the tour. Drove out to
the tip of the Mission Peninsula, then worked our way back doing wine tastings.
The whites were OK but Michigan isn’t the place to be growing red wine grapes.
Wine tasting overlooking Lake Michigan.
What happens when you do the wine tasting before going to the Mission Point lighthouse. This was not anyone in our party.
The trip was successful for birding too. We combined the
trip north with our annual quest for Kirtland’s warblers in the Grayling area.
We were successful, getting the Kirtland’s, upland sandpipers, and Brewer’s
blackbirds. We also hit Hartwick Pines State Park where we got Canada warbler,
Blackburnian warbler, and blue-headed vireo. At Phyllis’s place we got a winter
wren, right from the driveway.
While we were up in the Charlevoix area we got out to a new
place, the Sand Lakes Quiet Area. No surprise, the area has a bunch of small
lakes connected with trails. We hiked about a mile out to one of the lakes. There
were people camped on the lake and they actually carried kayaks the mile to the
lake. Unlikely these were Trump voters. At the lake, I got to do my first
odonating of the year. There was a whole
lot of food chain in action.
Eastern forktail eating a bug.
Four-spotted skimmer eating a calico pennant.
Spider nailing a four-spotted skimmer.
Spider nailing a four-spotted skimmer.
Spider nailing a four-spotted skimmer.
Male calico pennant.
Female calico pennant.
Female calico pennant.
Dot-tailed whiteface.
Back here at home things have been pretty quiet. I’ve been
doing a little woodworking and resurrecting an old floor sander that weighs the
same as a small truck to prep our basement floor. The woodworking was a lot
more fun. Yesterday we drove to near Ann Arbor to the Conservancy Farms to
chase a couple bird species missing from our list. We got a Henslow’s sparrow,
vesper sparrow, and dickcissel for the year. That brings my total to for the
year to 237 and Lise’s to 229.
A couple cutting boards I made.
Savanna sparrow at Conservancy Farms.
Female bobolink at Conservancy Farms.
Tree swallow at Conservancy Farm.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 