Four Goldeneyes
Four Goldeneyes
Image
1
Tag Archives: Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary
Four Canada Geese
Image
Four Canada Geese
Four Trumpeter Swans
Image
Four Trumpeter Swans
The Riverlands
Anne’s Autumn Foliage
Trumpeter Swans Takeoff
Four American Pelicans at the Mel Price Lock and Dam
No Black Friday sales for us. Although, I did snag a pretty good deal on an oil change. Call me sentimental that way. No, we avoided the crush of the malls in favor of becoming attuned to nature today. Anne and I trekked up to the Riverlands, our favorite neighborhood bird sanctuary. At first, it looked like we might have to go home empty-handed, but then we spied the pictured quartet of pelicans. We were circling around to the designer bird blind on the backside of Heron Pond, when we found the swans. There were easily a hundred of them. They were sitting out in some farmer’s cornfield, among the stubble, just sleeping or munching on the remains of this year’s corn crop. They like to forage in the surrounding cornfields during the day, but then return to the Riverlands before nightfall. They were quite content being there, at least until some mourners arrived to pay their respects at a small nearby rural cemetery. It wasn’t the mourners themselves that riled the swans, but their Great Dane. First in ones and twos, but soon with gathering numbers the swans took flight and scattered further afield, away from the dog. We never did make it to the Wash U architecture school designed bird blind, but we’ve seen it before. The big news of the day wasn’t the birds though. We discovered another wildlife refuge, Cora Island, which is part of the Big Muddy refuge. That’s right, Cora Island is on the Missouri River, while the neighboring Riverlands is on the Mississippi and in-between them both is Ted Jones State Park. Which is on both rivers, because it is at the confluence of these two mighty rivers. From the parking lot, we walked to Cora Island, but couldn’t cross over to it. The water is rather high right now, but we’ll come back again and explore this place some more later.
Liberty – American Bald Eagle
Image
Liberty – American Bald Eagle
Please Send More Snacks
Trumpeter Swans Amid Ice Floes
Al Bundy, I mean Ammon Bundy, honest mistake there, put out this urgent call for help. Those brave, rugged, American patriots who are defending a bird sanctuary in Oregon against the government and by proxy the rest of us too, have requested aid in the form of “more snacks”. A subsequent call for help, this time disseminated by Ammon’s mommy had a more diversified list of goods. Items range from the mundane, like eggs, which are apparently “needed badly”; to the questionable, like cigarettes either Marlboro Red 100’s or Lights 100’s. I’m pretty sure that this proposed mass transportation of cigarettes across state lines is a violation of the law. I’m just saying; to the really bizarre, like ice scrapers, really, really? What they really need is their own Go Fund Me page and avoid all of these snarky remarks.
We were able to free our own local bird sanctuary today. Since late December, it had been held hostage by flood waters. The Audubon center there was not flooded, but was an island for a while. The main causeway was overtopped and as the flood waters receded it acted as a levee and held the flood waters back, but on the wrong side. Many of the sloes were more flooded than I’ve ever seen them. There was debris everywhere. If you’ve lost a duck blind recently, contact the Riverlands, they have it available for your pickup. Probably the clearest sign of the flooding’s extent were the two navigational buoys that were both lodged in a thicket, a good half mile from the channel that they used to mark.
It was bitterly cold today, with a negative wind chill. The most common bird of interest were the Trumpeter swans. There were hundreds of them. When they flew into the stiff wind, they moved relatively slowly and were easier to photograph than when they flew with the wind and went sailing past you too fast for a picture. There were more than a few bald eagles too, but they usually hung out too far away for a decent photo.