Home for a rest

To paraphrase the Canadian folk rock band Spirit of the West---"These so called vacations will soon be my death, I'm so sick of the drive, I need home for a rest."  

   Things I learned over the last 10 days on my Yellowstone trip.
     1. Grand Prismatic Spring has to be the most beautiful 2 acres on Earth. 
  

  2. Although rain is inconvenient and doesn't make for great photo-ops, it's a great fire suppression system.  The low humidity out there not only creates a volatile tinderbox on every hillside it also allows quick temperature swings.  The temperature was 100 degrees when we picked my wife up at Bozeman airport on Tuesday and 28 degrees on Monday when we dropped her off.

   3. The libertarian philosophy out west can show itself anywhere, at anytime and is completely understood by everyone present.  Take the four-way stop at the corner of N. Canyon and Yellowstone Ave. in West Yellowstone MT.,  where rather than passing through the intersection in order in which they stopped at their respective stop signs the drivers proceed in order of their level of disdain for the government and no one beeps their horn and middle fingers remain in their holsters.  It's as if Fox News told them that the stop signs were put there by President Obama.
    4. There is a speed limit on the interstates in Montana and its not the same as the road's number designation.  My co-driver  was given 3 souvenir points to carry on her driving record for the next 2 years. On the plus side she did knock of an hour off of our GPS's estimated time of arrival in less than 3 hours.  I'm told that while I was trying to nap the arrival time display was ticking down like a NASA countdown.

Badlands, SD

Colorful Badlands

Wild animals fighting

Rock Wren

Mule Deer

Kissing Prarie Dogs

Pronghorns avoiding the midday sun

    A 3D effect can be sensed  in the pair of photos below by crossing your eyes until you see three images and then focus on the middle one.

3D view

   The effect works because the two images were taken from slightly different vantage points. 

Arizona Trip

     

 The trip begins.  Arrived home from work around 8:45am, finished packing, woke my daughter and hit the road by 9:15am.  A 14 hour ride fueled by Mountain Dew and Pepto Bismol had us pulling in to Tulsa, OK for the night.

  Day 2, drive was uneventful except for the heavy rain in the Texas panhandle that washed all the previous night's bugs off the windshield.  Late in the afternoon we reached Roswell, NM.  Something tells me we weren't the first visitors here.

   On Tuesday, we reached our first destination Patagonia, AZ. The house we rented was billed as a nature lovers paradise.  That it was.  The bird feeders had been filled in advance  of our arrival and we enjoyed the first chance on the trip to kick back and relax.  But how can you relax when the feeders, birdbaths and the trees were abuzz with birds.  Here are a few images I was able to capture.

Bridled Titmouse

     A humorous exchange took place between these two birds, when the Western Tanager took exception to the Black-headed Grosbeak arriving at the bird bath. The tanager kept squawking until the grosbeak got fed up and answered back and apparently had the last word. 

  Fortunately for me the tanager landed in a more picturesque setting.

  Here is a link to the Vacation Rentals by Owner listing for the house. http://www.vrbo.com/230952

Show Me Snow Geese

   Last November Tom Schlack, a birder on the Michigan birders listserve,  forwarded  a link to an online article about Snow Geese in Loess Bluffs NWR in Missouri. The article mentioned that up to 1,000,000 geese use the refuge as a staging area during their northerly spring migration. The accompanying photos were incredible. As a hack at both birding and photography I was intrigued to try to combine two of my interests in an opportunity that I couldn't screw up
   Now all I had to do was 1) monitor the refuge's website to see the totals of the waterfowl survey's  2) Hope for good weather for an 11 hour road trip that coincided with my days off.
  The stars aligned this past weekend as last Tuesday's survey indicated 1.2 million Snow Geese present and weather would be decent as long as I left Michigan early enough to duck south of developing winter storm in the upper midwest.  After a long day Thursday that consisted of an 8-hour shift and an 11-hour drive, I was at Loess Bluffs right after sunrise Friday morning and there they were, the largest group of Snow Geese I had ever seen(previous high was...1).


Snow Geese

    After marveling at the large gathering a local hunter told me he estimated that there were 400,000 in the lake and the rest would start coming back from the surrounding cornfields around midmorning. Then about 10 am, the geese start pouring out of the sky.

Snow Geese returning after breakfast



This seemed to continue unabated until about 2 pm.  By the time the influx ended there were at least 3 times more geese on the lake than there had been in the morning. 

   At first slowly, then more deliberately the birds started filing out of the lake for their evening meal. Here is a photo of the peak of the liftoff which was accompanied by a sound not unlike a home crowd roaring in response to a 99 yard last second winning touchdown.  When I got home and zoomed in on the full size version of this image I zoomed right in on a Ross's Goose.  Later it turned into bird nerd's equivalent of Where's Waldo to refind it.

mass liftoff of snow geese

After this mass liftoff I was hoping  for a colorful sunset against which I could photograph some goose V-formation silhouettes.  As luck would have it, the sun was being diminished by increasing cloud cover in advance of a wall of black clouds coming in from the north. What was lost in sihouettes against a fiery sunset was more than made up for by one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen.  The geese had taken off toward the black clouds and could be seen as at various distances as strings of white dots that moved in undulating waves.

Snow Geese heading toward black cloud.

Finally they all became white dots.

Snow Geese at a remarkable distance