Photos from Our Easter at Horicon Marsh

 

Today I worked on campus, and I wore a bright fuchsia blazer for the interview for my own job. They told me I'd have to become salaried to take the promotion, so now I really have some thinking to do. Years ago I dreamed of being salaried, but I've been in the system so long that now I'd lose a week of vacation if I switched. Also, I couldn't hang out with my Union peeps or my Congress peeps (some of whom are the same people) anymore. Of course, if they come back with an eye-watering increase in pay, that will make the decision even harder. 

At lunch I walked with Seabird, then I went to a discussion of the new visionary statement for the university. I thought it would just be us listening to a presentation, but in fact we sat at tables of four to six people and discussed what we didn't like about it, and most of the tables agreed that a university education shouldn't be viewed as a transaction, something to get you a good job, but as a means to learning how to think. The moderators told us earlier sessions had said very similar things, so that's good to hear. Then at our Staff Congress meeting, the Chancellor spoke to us. With so many meetings, I didn't really get any actual work done today.

As promised, here are Travalon's photos from our trip to Horicon yesterday. First, a few he took off our dock a few days earlier. It's Tux Duck and his buddy the male mallard with the purple head!

I assume it's the angle, but this duck always looks like he has a purple or blue head, not a green one.

Here are photos from Horicon. We saw lots of red-headed and ring-necked ducks.

We saw a cormorant in flight. I also saw a pelican in flight, and several egrets in flight, so I saw three out of the four Big White Birds.

Here is the third Big White Bird: the trumpeter swan! And they did sound like they were playing the trumpet!

More ring-necked ducks.

A pair of blue-winged teals.

This isn't the easiest photo to see, but there's a swallow and also a pied-billed grebe.

Here's a red-headed duck.

And some coots.

And yet more ring-necked ducks.

Rock pigeons are not native, but look - a white one with a more usual-colored one.

The purple martins are back.

This killdeer tried to convince us she was hurt so we would follow her away from her nest.

Here's the purple martin again.

I wish we could have gotten a photo of a gallinule. I heard lots of them, but they are notoriously hard to see, despite being shiny purple with a big red beak. The photos I have seen are like a fancier coot, only coots aren't shy, and they congregate by the dozens, so they are hard to miss. Gallinules hang out alone in the weeds, but sometimes you can see them swimming. Or so I hear, since I've never seen one.

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