birds – Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

We are back home after a ten day trip to Arizona. It was a good trip, mostly focused on birding. We had some time around Tucson and Green Valley but most of the trip was spent in the Portal area.

Lise and Anita in West Lafayette’s own Triple XXX diner for breakfast before heading to the Indy airport.

We flew a Boeing aircraft and it looked like they put duct tape on a hatch window. Doesn’t give one warm fuzzy feelings.

This was a Road Scholar trip. Road Scholar was once called ElderHostel so that should give you a good idea of the clientele. Nothing too strenuous. Not our typical birding excursion but my sister Anita wanted to do the trip so we joined her. There were 17 participants and two guides. Temperatures were on the high side. High as in, hovering around 100+ Fahrenheit every day. One day we were going up to about 8,000 feet and were told it would be 20 degrees cooler. It was cooler but it was still 85 degrees.

Birding Road Scholar style. Only thing missing is gin and tonics.

Portal is way out in southeastern Arizona, just a couple miles from New Mexico. Think of wide open spaces and a really tough environment. Not everyone would want to live there. The nearest grocery store to Portal is over fifty miles away. God knows how far it is to a Starbucks. On a busy day Portal has a population of around 700 if you include the larger metropolitan area. It’s in the Chiricahua Mountains, at an elevation of about 4,760 feet, right at the mouth of Cave Creek Canyon. Up the canyon a bit is the Southwest Research Stations where I spent a little time in 2012. One of the Portal “neighborhoods” is a dark sky community of about 40 people living on 400 acres. They have no outside night lights and have celestial telescope observatories built in their homes.

The social center of Portal is the Portal Store, Cafe, and Lodge. Which was our lodging while we were there. Simple, but quite adequate. While it looks humble, they fed well and did a great job of catering to a variety of dietary restrictions. Portal residents would drift in and out for a meal or drink. There was usually someone working on a car. I’m guessing the lodge had the only pair of jack stands in Portal. Mostly though, it was birders staying there.

The Portal Cafe and Lodge

Portal is a birding mecca. There are a number of eBird birding hotspots in the Portal area including Bob Rodriguez’s yard (Dave Jasper’s old yard) and the Jasper/Moisan feeders. Which is Dave Jasper’s new yard. Both of these yards are world famous birding hotspots. Birding tourism is a major income stream for Portal and numerous other feeder spots are in easy walking distance from the lodge. The locals don’t bat an eye when they see people with binoculars and spotting scopes walking up the street and looking in their yards.

Bob Rodriguez’s yard. I recognize the table holding a feeder as an old Craftsman table saw.

Our tour also took us to Paradise, AZ, about five miles and a half hour drive from Portal. At the turn of the 20th century, Paradise was a mining boom town with close to a thousand miners, stores, bars, and a red-light district. The mining lasted only a bit over a decade and the town was eventually mostly abandoned. Now the permanent population is somewhere under ten residents. But we did get an extremely rare white-eared hummingbird there, compliments of the George Walker House bird feeding station. And they rent rooms to birders.

We also did a trip to the Slaughter Ranch (San Bernardino Ranch), about 17 miles east of Douglas, AZ. A good nine of those miles are on rough dirt road. It’s named Slaughter Ranch for “Texas John” Slaughter, a legendary lawman that bought 65,000 acres in the 1880s. Two-thirds of the original ranch was south of the border with Mexico. The ranch buildings are now owned by the Johnson Historical Museum and most of the north of the border acreage is part of the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge. And, being right on the border, the border wall runs along the back of the ranch buildings. This part of the wall was built with louvers so the Border Patrol can drive along it and see through it into Mexico. The migrants have figured out that a motorcycle tire can be jammed into the louver. Then you stand on that tire and jam another one on top of it. You stand on the second tire and jam another one on top of that. Continuing to the top. Essentially we built a couple hundred miles of potential ladders over the border.

Slaughter Ranch with the see through border wall right behind it.

Birding wise, I would say we had a successful trip. We got around 80 species for the year. Lise and I both got some lifers. Not much time for photography when shuffling people in and out of tour buses, but the birding was good. In addition to birds we saw various insects, reptiles, and mammals that can live in a harsh environment.

Birds and other critters.

Gambel’s quail

One of the flycatchers

Mexican spotted owl

Curve-billed thrasher

The ubiquitous acorn woodpecker.

Desert firetail damselfly

Familiar bluet.

Some kind of lizard, out looking for a babe.

Some kind of chipmunk or ground squirrel.

Coati. These guys got some mean looking claws and an attitude. You don’t want to try petting one.

And we got some time in very different terrain than here in Indiana. Living east of the Mississippi one can get spoiled. You’re rarely far from a gas station or a good cup of dark roast coffee. It’s hard to comprehend the open spaces and the tough environment of a place like Portal. No Starbucks on every corner. It takes a special kind of person to live in a place like that. Someone with a sense of humor.

The Minions – lit up at night for your enjoyment.

Pony rides. On the way to Slaughter Ranch.

Chiricahua Mountains

Desert around Tucson

Somewhere out in the desert.

A cactus I liked.

While we were gone the groundhogs residing under my workshop dined quite well. The hostas by my workshop were nibbled into leafless stalks. Some garden plants were munched into non-existence. There was a hole where a pumpkin plant once resided. I sprayed the plants with a varmint repellant before we left. Apparently it served as Cajun seasoning to the groundhogs. Might be time to get serious on these guys.

Munched on pumpkin plants.

Hosta stalks.

In the weird wonders of wildlife category – a brown booby has shown up in a southern Indiana State Park pond. Brown boobies are tropical seabirds. Not sure how the pond at Spring Mill State Park could be mistaken for the Atlantic Ocean but I guess anything is possible. It seems quite happy there too. No sharks, salt free, and lots of bluegills easy to catch. Maybe that’s better than fighting tropical storms. Needless to say, birders and non-birders alike were flocking to see it.

Brown booby at Spring Mill State Park.

Widow skimmer at Spring Mill State Park.

Eastern pondhawk at Spring Mill State Park.

Saturday, May 25, 2024

We are now back in West Lafayette after a trip to Delaware. Good birding, some hiking and kayaking, a little photography and some great eating. This trip was mostly play time. Usually I program in maintenance time on the trailer. Not this trip. It was pretty much just go go go.

While in Delaware a friend from Bloomington visited for a couple days. Always interesting to see a place you’re familiar with through new eyes. When she left we dropped her off at Baltimore-Washington International Airport on our way back to Indiana. Which means I hauled a ten-foot trailer loaded with kayaks and bicycles through the BWI departure area. Not recommended. Almost as much fun as driving it through the Philadelphia city center.

Coastal Delaware is becoming highly developed. My family has had an association with the Lewes-Rehoboth area for about 50 years and the area has changed significantly in that time. At one time Lewes dried up in the winter. Think tumbleweeds blowing down the street. Now Lewes has a high end tequila bar the town is open all year. While Lewes and Rehoboth themselves aren’t growing, the immediate surrounding area has become a poster child for poor planning. I hate the over-development, but there is still the Delaware Bay, the Atlantic Ocean and miles and miles of coastline, coastal estuaries, and salt marshes. Protected by National Wildlife Refuges, State parks, and other protected areas that keep bringing us back.

Salt marshes off Oyster Rocks Road, near Lewes, DE

We planned this trip to coincide with the Atlantic Seaboard northbound shorebird migration. Shorebirds migrate up from places south of the equator to arctic nesting areas. Delaware Bay is a key staging area for the migration. The shorebirds time their migration to coincide with the horseshoe crabs coming ashore to lay their eggs. The peak is around the full moon in May. This perfect timing has been happening for many millennia. Shorebird numbers have been declining the past couple decades but on the order of a million shorebirds will lay over in the Delaware Bay during the migration. All hoping to get enough energy from horseshoe crab eggs to make it to the arctic and reproduce. One can only imagine the numbers before human impacts caused their numbers to drop.

Short-billed dowitcher at Mispillion River Inlet and Oyster Rocks Road.

Ruddy turnstones at Mispillion River Inlet.

Piping plover (Federally Endangered), at Cape Henlopen State Park.

A wind-blown marsh wren, at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge.

A non-bird red fox at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge.

We did some hiking and kayaking too. We kayaked two places we were familiar with, Fleetwood Pond in Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge and the Trapp Pond State Park Cypress Swamp Trail. Both places are within an easy drive for a couple million people, but we had them to ourselves.

Outrunning a thunderstorm at Fleetwood Pond.

A very friendly black racer (we believe) at Fleetwood Pond.

Kayaking the cypress swamp at Trapp Pond State Park. I believe this is the northernmost cypress swamp in North America.

The skeletal remains of a racoon found on a trail in Cape Henlopen State Park. We don’t know what ate it, we just know we don’t want to meet it on the trail.

And we did some great eating. With today’s interstates and refrigerated trucks I’m sure one can get crabs, clams, and oysters reasonably fresh and safe to eat in the Midwest. But I just can’t bring myself to accept that. If you want good shellfish you need to be close to the source. Indiana is not. Even with climate change and ocean rise, Indiana isn’t going to be coastal for a long, long time. Indiana can give you great breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches.They win that one. But sorry, no, I’m not buying oysters and clams in Indiana.

Fried oysters at The Surfing Crab restaurant. Along with hush puppies and cheesy grits. Kind of a corn squared thing. The restaurant is a small cinder-block building with plain painted walls where you will find the best crabs and fried oysters in Delaware. About five minutes from our trailer.

Slo & Lo BBQ. A weekend only pop-up barbecue place in Lewes. A couple of old retired guys with nothing to do on their weekends except make some of the best barbecue you will eat. About five minutes from our trailer.

It always takes a couple days after a trip to get things back to a semblance of normal. Laundry, back mail, restocking the refrigerator, processing photos, writing blogs. We came home to a yard that looked something like an alfalfa crop.

Time to harvest the crops.

And, it looks like the groundhog war has heated up. A few weeks ago Fat Boy, the resident groundhog, emerged from hibernation under my shop. He has been hanging around for a couple weeks, finding something to eat in the yard or woods behind us. Thus far being pretty benign. During the winter I closed off all the entrances going under my shop except his main one. He seemed fine with that. We went a couple weeks with no new construction going on. I thought maybe we had come to some kind of agreement. He can live peacefully under the shop as long as the tomatoes go unmolested and no new tunnels appear. I should have known better. We were greeted with three young groundhogs running around. And, either Fat Boy and his progeny, or their rabbit allies, have opened up the tunnels I closed off. This of course means war.

Monday, February 12, 2024

After a dreary January things have picked up a bit in our lives. For starters, we seem to be past the sub-zero temperatures. We’ve had a few spring-like days. Kind of scary warm for February days. And, Punxsutawney Phil did not see his shadow on Groundhog’s Day, predicting only six more weeks of winter. How can you go wrong with a groundhog predicting the weather?

Last week we got to do our annual Eastern Upper Peninsula winter bird trip. The one we tried to do in mid-January, but the weather thwarted. We drove up to St. Ignace, Michigan, and our friend Joanna came over from Marquette to meet us.

This year was very different from the past 20 or so years we’ve done this trip. The weather was weirdly warm for this time of year. We have done this trip in single digit temperatures. There’s always a lot of snow cover. This year the temps were in the mid-thirties Fahrenheit and there was very little snow cover. We were driving on gravel roads that in the past were snow-packed. We didn’t know they were gravel until this year. On the up side, there were no snowmobiles. The warm temperatures produced fog and beautiful hoarfrost in the mornings. The fog made for low visibility and some tough birding.

Beyond those frost-covered, fog-shrouded, trees is miles of open space. Our visibility range was maybe 20 yards at best.

Overall the birding was so-so. This area is known for snowy owls in the winter. We ran into multiple group outings and numerous individuals, looking for winter birds and in particular snowy owls. One loop we drive typically produces over 20 owls. This year there was only one known snowy owl in the area. Many people were looking for that individual. We finally saw it, with help from someone who spotted it and waited by the road to point it out. Too far away for good pictures, but we got our snowy owl for the year.

The much sought for snowy owl. It looked better in the spotting scope.

We saw other winter species too, but we had to work for them. Overall the number of species and the number of individuals seemed to be low. Very possibly because the low snow cover didn’t concentrate the birds as in other years. And, even if we didn’t get any new species for the year, it would have been a great trip. Getting north of the Mackinac Bridge and spending time with a good friend helps rejuvenate the soul.