Boolie

Finally

I’ve been spending money like a drunken sailor the past few days. The biggest purchases were a normal zoom for my camera (to replace the one that got smashed) and a laptop to replace my beloved but aging Powerbook.

The worst part has been deciding what to buy as my decisions changed on an almost daily (if not hourly) basis. I finally settled on Canon’s 17-55mm EF-S lens to replace the smashed 24-85mm lens and Apple’s 15″ MacBook Pro to replace my 15″ Powerbook. I went down last weekend to get the MacBook Pro but the store was out and didn’t get their shipment from Apple during the week. In the meantime I changed my mind and decided to get the regular MacBook instead of the Pro. If you’re reading this post faster than normal, it’s because it’s being written on my zoomy new white laptop instead of the old slower silver one.

And the lens? I changed my mind at the last minute on that one too and ordered Canon’s 24-105 L lens. That should be here on Tuesday (along with a circular polarizer, an 8 GB CF card, a remote release, an extension tube set, a card reader, a 2GB stick of memory for the MacBook, and a partridge in a pear tree).

Blame the drunken sailor.

And in case you’re wondering, the picture has nothing to do with this post, it’s just a picture of Templeton from last year that I finally got around to editing. He’s zonked out beside me at the moment but I’m sure he’d approve.

Call of The Gambeler

My alarm clock rang at 4:00am and I was on the road a half hour later, heading south out of Albuquerque and towards Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, best known for the spectacular fly-ins and fly-outs of snow geese and sandhill cranes during the winter months. It was late spring and those birds were long gone, but it was my first visit to New Mexico and I wanted to at least get a feel for the refuge. Even if it wasn’t the prime time to visit, I hoped for a few surprises.

The dark sky lightened as the minutes and miles passed, with the sun threatening to rise as I pulled into the parking lot of the Visitor’s Center. There were no other cars in the lot and I knew the center would be closed, but I hoped to find some trail maps and refuge information. When I opened the car door, I was greeted by a primal call coming from up the hill. Another call came, and then another. I didn’t recognize the call, so I grabbed the camera with the big telephoto lens attached and headed up the steps and towards the calls.

I moved slowly but anxiously until I saw a wooden pole with signs pointing in various directions. In the dim light I could see its top was crowned with a carved bird in the shape of a quail. I was a little disappointed when I guessed the calls were just a recording and no more real than the carving, something to give visitors a taste of the birds of the refuge. I decided to return to the car and head out onto the refuge proper. Before I could take a step the supposedly carved quail raised its head and gave a loud call.

I continued into the little desert arboretum as other quail were calling around me. It was a delightful little moment, to go from not sure if I’d see much of anything that day to being surrounded and serenaded by these birds on their high perches. The sun peeked above the horizon and I found this male in a nice location and angle to the sun, and only had to wait for the sun’s rays to reach him and for him to make his call.

I didn’t have to wait long.

A later look at my bird book showed them to be Gambel’s quail, a species I had never seen before. But names didn’t matter for now. I stood alone and watched and listened, mesmerized by my welcome to Bosque.

Our Most Beautiful Protector

On our first trip to New Mexico, my wife and I spent our first day at Bandelier National Monument. Most of the day we wandered about the cliff dwellings built by the ancestral Pueblo, even putting aside our fear of heights to climb the wooden ladders to a kiva high in the cliffs.

We still had enough time at the end of the day to wander up to the western edge of the park and do a little hiking on the Cerro Grande trail. At the trailhead parking lot, this sapsucker flew up into a tree right next to the wooden fence. The tree was obviously a favorite as it had drilled a bunch of irregular holes on this side of the tree and a regular patchwork of squares on the other side.

It was my first time to ever see this sapsucker, a beautiful little jewel, and I was thrilled to be only a few feet away and watch it work the tree for sap. While we were watching, we heard a loud crashing sound a short ways away in the forest. As we looked up, a tree came crashing down across the trail ahead of us, unusual given the lack of wind. If we hadn’t stopped to watch the sapsucker we might have been on the trail when the tree came down, so this little bird became not only one of my favorite wildlife encounters from the trip but perhaps our most beautiful protector.

Feelings

Do you know that wonderful feeling when you wake up and realize it’s Saturday and you have the day to yourself? Do you know that miserable feeling when you realize it isn’t Saturday, it’s Friday, and you have to get up and go to work?

At least Scout climbed on top of me this morning when I woke up and tried to soften the blow.

Birthday Girl

Happy Birthday to Miss Scout, who turns six years old today. I took this picture of the birthday girl this afternoon in our dining room.

Red-spotted Breakfast

Red-spotted snakes are almost too beautiful for words. They are not too beautiful for breakfast, apparently, at least not if you’re a hungry bittern. I came across this bittern after it had captured a red-spotted garter snake early one morning. It killed the snake by applying pressure with its beak, often to the snake’s head. The snake was already bleeding a little bit and not putting up much of a fight.

While it adjusted the snake’s position in its beak from time to time, it never let the head get too far from its beak so the snake couldn’t swing up and bite any soft tissue. It took a while for the snake to die, this shot is from right at the end of the snake’s life, it went limp after this final crushing of its head. The bittern made sure the snake was dead before swallowing it by thrashing it around.

Probably a good idea when your breakfast can bite you back.

I’ve Created A Monster! A Monster!

Make that two monsters.

Templeton has been sleeping quite a bit in the warm bed he finally discovered yesterday (in fact, he’s zonked out in it right now). He was sleeping in it earlier today when Scout came up and discovered him sleeping in the bed she has avoided like the plague. Curious as to what he was doing, she jumped up beside him and he made a run for it. She decided to mimic her hero and curled up in the bed for a bit.

She didn’t stay long, but long enough for a few pictures.

A Warm Bed

We’ve had a bit of a cold snap in Portland lately. Templeton often seeks out warm places to sleep even during normal winter temperatures, so before Christmas my wife bought him a little bed that has an electric warmer built into the bottom. It warms up when the cat lies down, which seemed like the perfect thing for a sleepy cat. Only problem was, Templeton wouldn’t go in it. Scout seems to think it of the devil and won’t have anything to do with it whereas Templeton just didn’t seem that interested. I promised my wife that I could get him to use it in a few weeks. She washed the cover just in case it had a smell they didn’t like.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present you with exhibit A: Templeton zonked out in his new bed.

He’s all curled up now beside me and snoring a little bit so hopefully he will continue to enjoy his new bed. On the plus side, if he sleeps here instead of my chairs, maybe it will avoid little incidents like I had today where I came home from a visit to Ridgefield and promptly sat down in a hairball he hacked up while I was gone.

Good times!

Daniel Lee Rider 1941-2006

If you’ve wandered through my web site or read through my blog, you’ll know many of the things I treasure in life. Hiking through the hills, little newts on the forest floor, the quacking of rafts of waterfowl in the winter. My cats sleeping on my chest or having adventures through the house or through my mind. But there’s at least one thing that’s of great importance to me that I deliberately haven’t talked about here: my family. I keep a separate set of pages for family pictures and stories that isn’t linked from my public site.

Today I’ll make an exception.

My stepfather Dan was diagnosed with lung cancer earlier this year. While the cancer treatment itself was progressing well and the tumors were greatly decreased, Dan developed a rapid case of radiation pneumonitis as a result of his treatment and his breathing troubles became severe enough that he needed to be put on a ventilator. I flew in a couple of weeks ago to be with him and my family, but unfortunately he didn’t improve.

Dan passed away on December 13th.

Dan came into my life a couple of decades ago when he and my mom started dating. They had been high school sweethearts but married other people and spent years apart, then started dating again after they each got divorced. Dan would drive down from Indiana on the weekends to be with us in Tennessee, and did that many, many times. They were like high school sweethearts all over again, and even though I didn’t know him very well then, it brought me great joy to see how happy he made my mom.

If Dan had done nothing else than make my mother that happy during the following years after they got married, that would have been enough for me. She deserves that happiness and I wished she had known that all her life. Fortunately for me, though, that was not the end of our relationship, as Dan and I grew close over the years.

Dan was my stepfather, but he loved me as a father and I loved him as a son.

I have many wonderful memories of him, so that even in this time of sadness as I mourn his passing, I also rejoice in the times we spent together. He helped me buy my first car when I was in college, a little red Nissan Pulsar. That was the first car I actually enjoyed driving, and it served me well during many trips back and forth between school and home, as well as around town and to the places I interned each summer.

He reached out to my wife and made her feel welcome in our large family, as he had been an outsider at one time as well. Dan had touched many lives in his life, and it was never more evident than when out in public in Indiana. Even walking through the Cincinnati airport when he picked up my wife and I a few years ago, we kept running into people he knew even as we walked from our gate to the exit. Everyone wanted to stop and say hi, because everybody liked him. That’s the kind of man he was.

Last summer after a family get-together, the rest of the family had departed but I had a few hours before my flight. I asked Dan if he could take me around the golf courses (the house is on a golf course) and he was happy to oblige. On a beautiful day, I’d prefer to go hiking and photograph wildlife, but Dan loved to golf. I know little of golf and peppered him with endless golf questions as we drove around in the golf cart, and we also discussed the various animals we saw as we went around, from a raccoon (a personal favorite of mine) to the odd coloration of some of the squirrels here, with a black-and-white coloring that makes them look a little raccoon-ish. It was one of those times where we didn’t discuss anything of great import, it was just nice to spend time together.

I got to see him this summer and again at Thanksgiving, and each visit ended with a strong hug. I talked to him on the phone shortly before he went into the hospital a couple of weeks ago, he wanted my help in choosing a present for my mom for Christmas. That was before we knew how serious his condition was, and it was the last time I spoke to him before he died. At first I regretted that our last discussion wasn’t about something more meaningful, but I quickly decided that it was completely appropriate. Even when he was feeling that miserable, his thoughts were of others, and to his dying day he was trying to do something nice for my mom and those he loved.

I don’t have any regrets about our relationship, he departed far too soon but he knew how I loved him and I knew how he loved me. It would have been nice to be be able to spend more time together, but we treasured the moments we had. Even now when I think of him, I don’t picture the man in the hospital bed hooked up to the ventilator, I think of the man in the picture above, beaming at his newest granddaughter who is beaming back at him. I took the picture at Thanksgiving this year, just a couple of weeks before he died. We had no idea at the time that he would get so sick so quickly.

The last couple of weeks have been the saddest of my life and I’m sure the last tears have not yet been shed. But even as I mourn for the loss in my life, I rejoice in the way he blessed my life and in the faith of the life yet to come.

Taking Advantage

In a world where might makes right being small wouldn’t seem to have any benefits. Indeed whenever the mother of this cub and its sibling sensed danger from another adult bear in the area, she’d send the little ones scurrying up into the trees. When it came time to feed however this little cub discovered its small size gave it an advantage. The larger bears couldn’t climb into the thin branches at the top of the tree so this part still had plenty of pine cones, ripe for the picking for the adventurous cub. Like a kid in a candy store, there were more cones at the treetop than the cub could possibly eat but it stayed for quite some time, feasting on the treasure it discovered.