Yesterday, we drove up to the Riverlands for some birding action. The Audubon Visitor’s Center had reopened for the first time in over a year-and-a-half. We checked the bird sightings list and knew that we should keep an eye out for eagles and pelicans. We saw three eagles, but no pelicans. I guess that they don’t work Sundays. It was colder there than I had expected, with a cold north wind blowing over the flood plain. Because of that we didn’t do much walking, but instead retreated to our RAV4 mobile bird blind and turned on the heated seats. Driving around, we noticed that the road to Ted Jones Confluence State Park was open again, for the first time in two years. It had been heavily damaged in the 2019 flood. Last year, we bushwhacked our way to the other side of the Missouri River, where we could at least see some of the damage at the Confluence, across the river. The paved sidewalk had been destroyed and is pictured below. I blogged about this adventure then, here. At the Confluence everything has now been repaired again, but some minor flooding must have subsequently occurred, because there was mud everywhere.

We spent Halloween evening, next door at Art and Caroline place. They had a fire and we both handed out candy. We got rid of all of ours. Caroline estimated that they had fifty trick-or-treaters, which is way more than usual. I think that the fire, a warmer evening, plus being out there with the kids must have attracted everyone. The most unusual event of the evening was when a car drove up and two boys popped out for some drive-by trick-or-treating. Most of the jokes were sorry sounding dad jokes, but the best of the lot was this one. “How do you make ‘one’ disappear? Add a G to it.”