Ramble with Storm: Bird brains & a dad doing it right

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Mulling things on my morning ramble with Storm, the family’s mixed Lab.I wonder if the poultry growers would mind if i took my box turkey call to the county fair and practiced on the prize turkeys in wire pens. They sure do gobble enough i could practice much.

It would be a captive audience.

Or would learning to call off captive birds build a false tone?

Questions, questions, questions.

i knock myself out with my wit, much to the chagrin of the family.

It was a birdy morning. Maybe it is the incoming weather or something.

A blue jay squawked as we passed the neighbor’s at the start. I couldn’t find it, but sure could hear it.

The meathead hustled an adult rabbit across the alley by the bus barn and into the evergreens.

A Eurasian collared-dove called from a telephone pole across from the fire house. I had not heard them for awhile. It’s not the most pleasant sound, but distinctive.

The massive thistles on the extended ramble look no closer to blooming than they did a week ago. I think we need a couple days of 90s to pop them. We need that for them, not necessarily for us.

At the far end of the extended ramble this morning I found the 10-foot high sunflowers above, which may explain the sightings of goldfinches this week.

A belted kingfisher made its piercing squawk again in the heavy canopy of the southwest corner of the north old clay pit. I found out why when I saw a dad and his boy in a small boat working the west shoreline.

As a fisherman and outdoors writer, I watched the pair. There was a dad, or maybe a grandfather who was doing it right.

i first heard the kid whooping and hollering farther down the bank. I suspect he got into a fish. i noticed only the kid was casting. That’s what I mean by doing it right. Put your own damm rod away until the kids are old enough to wander off on their own.

The kid wasn’t a particularly good caster, but the adult didn’t yell or correct him constantly, just tended to rowing the boat or running the trolling motor, if needed.

it was a cool scene.

A scene that turned even cooler when a sandpiper, a small one, flitted off from just across the bridge over the neckdown between the two pits. i am pretty sure of the ID, but not positive.

Back in town, a wee rabbit, maybe two weeks old, ran under the blue spruces across from the bus barn.

Near home a black squirrel hopped away from the neighbor’s ground feeder.


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