Last night Anna Banana II, Jilly Moose, Richard Bonomo, and I went to the Green Lantern on Lake Waubesa for dinner. We said we were expecting six (including Travalon and OK Cap), so they sat us at a table for eight and then kept pestering us about the other two not being there. We had steaks to celebrate the Friday of the Easter Octave, and everyone else around us was having a fish fry just like it was still Lent. Here are a couple of photos of the sunset over Lake Waubesa.
This morning I met Anna Banana II, Jilly Moose, and Rich for coffee at Ancora, then Travalon and I were going to go to Horicon Marsh with Anna Banana II, but they were forecasting rain all day, so she and Rich just came over to walk in our neighborhood. I love these hot pink hyacinths with the yellow daffodils.
We went to the dock to see if we could find any interesting birds around. We did find an interesting spider, but my photo of it isn't that great. Travalon took some photos of the buffleheads.
I didn't realize until looking at his photos on my computer that the female canvasback was hanging out with the buffleheads.
Here is a male bufflehead.
And here is the male canvasback, hanging out by himself and not with the female... or the buffleheads.
This golden squirrel has been in our neighborhood for years. How long do squirrels even live?
This red-winged blackbird was following us around, so Travalon got some good shots of him.
His wife is a little shyer, hiding in this tree.
And here is the golden squirrel again.
This is one of the Canada geese that always hang around behind Mariner's.
I felt bad because earlier in the morning I had walked with my neighbor and we had seen cranes everywhere we turned, but of course when Anna Banana II and Rich come to see them, they are nowhere to be seen. We did finally spot one looking in our neighbor's window.
It still wasn't raining that hard, so Travalon, Anna Banana II, and I decided to go to Lake Wisconsin, to a little area called Okee where we had seen the pelicans and loons a few weeks ago. We had lunch at Lucky's overlooking the lake, and we could see some pelicans out on it. Now and then one would fly overhead. Then just as we finished, we saw two bald eagles flying around too. Travalon ran out and grabbed his camera. Here is one eagle flying.
Kind of far away from us on the lake, we could see what we thought were loons swimming around with the pelicans, but once I looked at the pictures on my computer, I could see they were cormorants. They are all black, while loons have intricate white designs on them, and only their heads and necks stick out of the water as they swim around, while loons swim on top of the water when they aren't diving under it.
This picture might be hard to see, but it made me laugh because the pelican and cormorant appear to be having a deep conversation:
Pelican: "...and so, the juxtaposition of the profound and the profane in Chaucer explains his continuing popularity lo these many centuries."
Cormorant: "Agreed. While I appreciate his critique of the role of religion in Medieval society, we all know we still read him for his fart jokes."
These two species seem to coexist peacefully, since we saw hundreds of them together on Pilot Island in Door County.
Then we drove to the causeway that leads to Tipperary Road, and we stopped at the park across from the little cottage where we stayed for our anniversary last year. This is the view looking toward the lake.
I really like this shot of a female bufflehead.
And here she is with her mate.
This is looking up the river toward a bluff.
Then we headed home, and Travalon and I went to the Wonder Bar Steakhouse, because a) I have always wanted to go, and b) they are probably going to tear it down soon. So sad, it's a successful business, but a developer offered the owner a lot of money so they could build some ugly big thing there. I love this building! It's from 1929, and it has quite a history. When it was a different bar, I used to go to bluegrass jams upstairs. It looks like a little castle.
This is what the rooms in the turrets look like.
We sat in the main room, by this fireplace. We needed a bigger party to reserve a turret room.
When we got home, we took a postprandial walk, and of course three cranes were right there. They look a little bedraggled from the rain.
This one was pulling branches off of the pine tree I have featured on this blog many times.
Then it chased the third one, but the photos of that didn't turn out. Oh, one thing I did see from the dock yesterday was a pair of pied-billed grebes. I took a photo with Travalon's camera, but it's pretty out of focus. I'll post it anyway. Too bad Travalon wasn't there - he takes much better photos.
They are tiny little things, even smaller than the buffleheads, and they dive constantly, so it's hard to get a really good picture of them. Also, I don't seem to know how to focus Travalon's camera. This photo doesn't do them justice, but you can sort of see the stripes on their bills. I am hoping that, since there is a pair of them and a pair of canvasbacks and a pair of wood ducks (no pictures of them) and plenty of pairs of buffleheads, maybe we will have babies in our neighborhood of all these birds, plus the cranes and geese that we see every year. The grebes would be particularly cute, if they carry their babies on their backs like the larger grebes do. I saw that once up in Door County years ago, with Anna Banana II and Tiffy. I'd love to see it again!
Famous Hat
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