After blogging yesterday, I googled "Is a fascinator a hat?" and apparently everyone was wondering the same thing, because the question autofilled. According to Wikipedia, the answer is no, so the woman who won "Best Woman's Hat" yesterday at the Kentucky Derby Party technically shouldn't have won, but she did have the best headwear. Today at brunch we had lots of people, including Cecil Markovitch and Hockey Girl, and when I posed the question, Hockey Girl was quite definitive that she felt a fascinator is, in fact, a hat. I am still not sure where I stand on this issue. Guess I'm a fascinator agnostic.
After brunch, Travalon and I drove to the parking lot by Picnic Point and took a walk along Lakeshore Path, thinking we might see coots. We didn't see any, but we did see lots of red-winged blackbirds.
And we saw baby geese!
When we turned around and came back, two of the babies ran right toward us. That was cute but kind of scary, since we figured the parents might attack us. But they seem to be unconcerned about humans.
Here is a regular red-winged blackbird:
This one only has the yellow stripe, not the bright red shoulder patch, but he's kind of speckled too, so maybe he's a juvenile?
Then we went to Tiedeman's Pond and saw lots of birds and mammals. We saw great blue herons.
And a beautiful white egret.
This heron looks like he has a mullet!
And of course we saw red-winged blackbirds.
Here you can see the egret and the herons are all close together. There are three herons.
We also saw a little quail-like bird running around in the bushes as we walked on the boardwalk, but Travalon wasn't able to get a photo of it. We both thought he took a photo of the sandhill crane that was posing in front of us, but nothing uploaded to my computer. He did take a photo of a female red-winged blackbird.
And here is the egret from the other side of the pond.
We saw a pair of wood ducks.
There is a blond squirrel there, just like the one in our neighborhood (which we haven't see in months).
When we got back to where we'd started, the egret was still there.
Some people with a bunch of little kids were all excited about a woodchuck, and sure enough, we saw there was one climbing a low bush.
Tonight at band practice, Bongo the chocolate lab was snuggling up to me because so many of our bandmates are cat people and don't really like him. As soon as we started playing, he left the room, so I wondered if he hated the sound of the mandolin. But then every time we would stop playing, he would return to snuggle up to me again. I said we could do the "Bongo Test": if we are taking so long between songs that Bongo comes back to snuggle, then our audience would be losing interest. Hardingfele said her cat Vinnie is better, and I said, "But he attacked you so badly that you had to go to the emergency room - twice!" It turns out Bongo has also sent his grandma to the emergency room twice, but that is because he is still a puppy in his head but a huge dog in real life, so he pulled her so hard during walks that twice she injured her arm. I said that's the difference - he didn't hurt her on purpose. Vinnie purposely attacked Hardingfele so badly that she needed stitches. And who wants a pet like that?
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