Birdwatching at Band Practice

 

This morning, after Mass in the gym, Travalon and I drove toward Black Earth to get me some new sandals, since it's getting to be that time of year and my old ones didn't age well in Bimini. On the way we realized we were hungry, so we stopped for lunch at Crossroads Coffee House. We had iced coffee drinks and (skip this part, Jilly Moose) mushroom quiche. Then we continued on to Black Earth and got my new sandals.

It was a lovely day, so we went for a hike at Festge Park, where a volunteer told us all about the park. We walked in the woods and saw lots of blooming Jacks in the Pulpit and budding mayapples, as well as all sorts of other woodland flowers, like those lavender ones I was told are wild geraniums by some people and cranes bills by others. Maybe those are two different flowers...? 

We took a short walk at Striker Pond and didn't see much except for a robin's nest with three babies. Travalon didn't think to bring his good camera, so when we went two blocks away to Tiedemann's Pond, he had to take photos with his cell phone. We saw an egret.

Then it was joined by a great blue heron.

Suddenly we realized there was another egret in the tree right above us!

While I was doing Irish, Travalon met his oldest brother and his wife, who had brought some old photos for him. He showed them to me, and some of them were so cute! There was Travalon on his first birthday, and Travalon at the zoo in (?) the pen with the flamingos and a crowned crane, and Travalon with a nativity scene. Maybe I'll post some later, if he lets me.

I did some more birdwatching at band practice. We had an audience.

Apparently this is a barred owl. I am getting this both from the birdwatching social media hive mind and my own google search. It has a call that can sound like a dog barking, which makes sense because my bandmate whose backyard this is says she heard it and it sounds like a dog barking. There were a couple of crows that really didn't like it being there, and they kept trying to chase it away, but it mostly ignored them. Eventually it flew off, so maybe it didn't like the song we did in the Dorian mode. Our bass player didn't like it, but I still am not sure if she just thought the chords were wrong (which they were) or if she simply doesn't like the Dorian mode. It's one of my favorite modes, but there's no rule that everyone has to like it.

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