It's the end of the month (wow, it almost felt like a normal month) and it's time, once again for P.J.'s monthly photo blogging challenge. This month's theme was keeping busy and the tough part of this month was to narrow down my selections to just five photos and I actually cheated a little bit on one of them since it's a collage, but you'll see why I did it in the story. This is also the 1 year anniversary of my retirement of teaching. May 31st last year was my last day on the job and ironically, I was much busier in the early part of this first year than I am now, but then again, you could say it's a different kind of busy. Here's my five photos interpreting the theme of Keeping Busy.
1. Environmental art
I viewed part of this theme as not necessarily all me keeping busy, but seeing how others are also coping with this. I go on photo walks on a daily basis around my neighborhood and one of the neighbors just up the street from us has been creating some environmental art as a way to keep busy during this strange time we're having. She walks around the neighborhood looking for stones that she can use in her art projects. She told me she has a mental image of what she wants to create and then goes out looking for stones to help her create her image. She glues the stones to a tile and inlays the tile along the sidewalk in front of her house. This is the third of about 7 or 8 she has created over the course of the last month or so. There is a piece depicting a couple canoeing, a child holding a bunch of helium balloons and a couple backpacking. The backpacking piece just showed up this morning and she has room for about 3 or 4 more pieces along this part of her front yard. Since they live on a corner, I'm hoping she continues with this around the other side of their house.
2. Cairns
Another house near us has created cairns using their existing rocks, at least I'm assuming they're only using their existing rocks. But as you can see, they have a lot of rocks in their front yard in which to choose, so I think I'm safe in assuming this. The cairns actually have changed a number of times over the course of the month. I suspect that others in the neighborhood either are attempting to add to the cairns, or are just deliberately toppling them over. Either way, I've noticed that they take different heights and positions, so the owners don't seem to be deterred by their cairns changing shapes. They also have a rather large collection of gnomes and buddhas in the front yard, many of which are also balanced on some of these stones. You can see examples of both of these in the background of my second shot.
3. Angry Bird©
About three weeks ago, I noticed this Angry Bird© plush toy appear in our local park. I figured it would last a day or two before someone would pick it up and take off with it, but it kept showing up every single day in a different part of the park. Eventually, it made its way out to the front of the community center, where I figured, for sure, it will disappear as soon as a worker sees it just lying amongst the shrubbery. Nope, it continued to be busy and move around and I started documenting its movements as it spent each day in a different part of the park. Several times, I thought it was gone, but it showed up again, or I'd just missed it the last time I was out walking in the park. The park is a fairly large park and there's lots of nooks and crannies in which to hide something like this, but someone or several someones are having fun kicking it around. I guess that's why it's probably an Angry Bird©.
I thought about taking it myself and making a photo journey of it as I wandered about the park, but my wife convinced me that the spirit of the Angry Bird© was that it needed to just move naturally, by others, not manipulated by me, so I left it for others to move around. The only manipulation I did with the bird was to place it upright before taking its photo.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to spot it for the last four days and I'm worried that it might have flown the coop. It's gone MIA previously since I first noticed it in the park, but this has been the longest period of time that I haven't been able to see it somewhere in the park. Ironically, the last time I did see it was back in the far reaches of the park, that very few people go to, so I don't think it was regular foot traffic doing it in. There is a day care on the other side of the fence from where I last saw it so perhaps someone thought it was from there and tossed it over the fence. I went and looked over the fence this morning to see if I see it, but it didn't appear to be there. Hopefully, it'll show up shortly in another part of the park, but if it doesn't, I hope whoever took it will give it a good home.
4. Birds
In this post, I talked about the different kinds of birds I've been noticing in the neighborhood. I've been keeping myself busy rediscovering my DSLR and the main subject over the past couple of months have been birds. The same park where the plush toy had been found is also a great area to go bird watching. I discovered why one day while I wasn't in the park, but the day that I took this shot of a western bluebird. This shot was taken in the front yard of a house that abuts to the rear end of the park. On the park side is a nice fifth of a mile trail that winds in and out of some citrus and juniper trees. Five times around and you've walked a mile and probably seen a lot of nature.
Still, I kept thinking there seemed to be an inordinate amount of birds back in this area. Then I started noticing a peacock call. Hmmmm. So as I was out walking, I spotted the bluebird and got several good shots of it and the owner of the house came out and we had a nice conversation about birds in general. And yeah, he has a peacock in his back yard and so spreads seed around quite generously, which attracts other birds including the western bluebird pair.
So because of the neighbor keeping busy taking care of his own flock, I've been kept busy taking wildlife photos. We sort of have a symbiotic relationship, although he's not really getting much from me, but I seem to benefitting greatly. As noted in my other post, my overall knowledge of birds has increased in the last couple of months and I've been able to up my photography game as well. It's keeping me busy and I'll take that. Walking around outside is much better that sitting home inside on your butt all day long.
5. Speaking of butts
This particular nesting site is in the opposite direction of the park where I take most of my bird shots, but the acorn woodpeckers holing up here some to like this particular tree. There are a couple of different nests inside this tree, not all of which are acorn woodpeckers.
Over the course of my many daily walks, I'd see the woodpeckers flying to and fro from other trees back over to this one, but could never spot where their nest was until one day a week ago, when I came upon the tree from a different angle than what I'd normally been approaching the tree. That made all the difference in the world. I watched one of the two parents swoop down from a neighboring palm tree, alight on the trunk of the tree and then quickly disappear inside the hole. I feel fortunate that I was actually able to get this shot, but those two parental birds were busy flying here and there taking care of their young. I guess it's a concentrated burst of parenting as opposed to a longer period that we do over the childhood of our own offspring.
And there you have it, my five photos interpreting the theme Keeping Busy. Please stop by P.J.'s blog and check out some of the other photographer's interpretation of the same theme.
After leaving South Dakota, we continued our travels eastward toward Wisconsin, but as we worked our way across Minnesota, we turned south and headed down into Iowa. We were close to Clear Lake, Iowa and if you at all familiar with the town, you know that's where Buddy Holly, J.P. Richardson, aka the Big Bopper and Richie Valens met their demise on February 3, 1959 - the Day the Music Died.
Tired of riding in cold busses, the three up and coming singers decided to charter a plane after their concert in Clear Lake, Iowa and fly to the next city on their tour. Unfortunately, sometime around 1 in the morning, the plane crashed in a cornfield just out of town and all three singers plus the pilot Roger Peterson perished. Holly was 22, the Big Bopper was 28, Valens was 17 and the pilot Peterson was 21. Adverse weather conditions and the inexperience of the pilot were both contributing factors in the crash.
As we came into town, we had several spots we wanted to visit, all of which were centered around the crash and geocaching. The first spot was a cache that took us to the dirt road that led to the crash site. There's a large monument of Buddy Holly's signature glasses at this spot. The next stop was a virtual cache a short quarter mile walk in between fields to the shrine that has been erected over the years in memory of the singers.
At the shrine, both my son and I took each other's photos. Usually when crashes like this happen, the big name star or stars are listed, but no one else is reported or very rarely mentioned at spots like this. How many of you can name all of the people who died in the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash? I can probably dredge up a couple of names, but most of them are already lost due to Bryant's fame. At least at this shrine, there is mention of the pilot who also died in the plane crash, which I liked to see.
Following our stop there, we walked back out to the car and then headed into downtown Clear Lake to the Surf Ballroom, where there is another small area dedicated to the last concert the singers gave the previous night of February 2, 1959. After that, we left and headed east to Mason City, Iowa where we would spend the night.
The next morning was the first Saturday of the month and as is my custom, I host a monthly morning coffee event. It's a nice way to meet and greet the local geocachers. Almost exclusively, they are held at local coffee shops near where I live, but I was out of town on this road trip, and so I planned one for that morning in Mason City. It was the first geocaching event ever held in Mason City. I've hosted a couple of other out of state events when I've been out and about, and it's always fun to meet the local cachers in a particular area, this one being no exception to that rule.
We talked geocaching for about an hour or so, then went our separate ways, us heading eastward to Wisconsin. Our timing was impeccable as we ended up meeting up with another group of geocachers in eastern Iowa for lunch that day as well.
I've always enjoyed attending geocaching events and as soon as this virus pandemic has eased and it's safe to attend or host events like this again, I plan to enjoy them in the future. As of this moment, we've only been able to connect with our geocaching friends on-line via Zoom meetings, but that will change hopefully in the near future.
By mid afternoon, we pulled into my sister-in-law's town of Beloit, Wisconsin where we'd spend a couple of days just relaxing. It felt good to visit with family and not have to drive anywhere for the next two days.
Back in the 60s, my dad's best friend took a sabbatical from teaching to pursue an advanced degree. He ended up getting his degree from a university in Wisconsin and they ended up taking the entire family back for the year. When they returned his son, my friend had new decal stickers, one of which was from Badlands National Monument. Being the map nerd that I am, I was intrigued and looked it up and thought at some time in the future, it would be interesting to visit the park. Since that time, Congress has upped the status of the monument and now it's a national park located east of Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.
As we approached Badlands National Park, we kept seeing advertisements for Wall Drug, which is a major tourist trap just north of the park. Yeah, we stopped there, only to look around, find a tee-shirt of the place, mainly because I like advertising weirdly different stuff I've visited and then headed south out of town into the park. The park is a geologic wonderland of erosion and there were pullouts along the road with many interpretive signs. We ended up stopping at several, including one where there was a herd of young bighorn sheep. The sheep are very hard to see mainly because they blend in so well with the browns of the badlands, which is why there are no photos of them here.
At another turnout, we stopped and took a walking tour of an interpretive loop trail while we gathered answers for an earth cache based upon fossils. The area is rich in fossil life and we weren't disappointed, getting to see several different varieties of fossils in the rock layers. What was also outstanding about the day was the weather. As you can see from the photos, we ended up driving through the beginnings of a large series of thunderstorms as we made our way across southern South Dakota that day. The first storm started while we were on our way out of the visitors center at the east end of the park heading back to the Interstate (third photo). The clouds made for some gorgeous photo opportunities. And, as always, I could have spent more time there, but we had an itinerary to keep to and were actually attending a geocaching event in South Dakota later that evening (who goes to a geocaching event several thousand miles from home?).
I'm sure I'll get back to the area in the future and the plan will be to camp a couple of nights there to fully enjoy the park. We got an appetizer of the park that day, be enough that made us both want to come back.
On our way back out to the Interstate, we got pelted with rain, as we had earlier the day before coming from Wind Cave National Park. This time, the storm got a little bit more severe as we drove across the South Dakota prairie. We had the radio on and we kept getting the weather alerts, those alerts that we rarely get in Southern California because we don't get any kind of severe weather, but scares the bejesus out you when they come on. These were coming every fifteen minutes detailing thunderstorms and worse, hail storms, with hail the size of ping pong balls. Later, the size of the hail stones were "upgraded" to golfball size hail. Fortunately, they also listed counties where this was likely to happen and my youngest was tracking it using the atlas and checking out where the counties were and all of the major alerts were south of the Interstate, so we missed the hail, but did get an entertaining thunder and lightning storm accompanied by very heavy rain. Fortunately, the geocaching event was under a covered shelter in a park, so we stayed high and dry for the entire event except when we were walking to and from our car.
I've attended five geocaching events out of state and every one has been very enjoyable. We share a common hobby and it's always fun to swap stories with the local geocachers. We'd had problems with a cache near our motel and I mentioned it to one of the cachers there and he pointed me to another cacher who was the owner. The owner of the cache met up with us back at his cache after the event and we discovered that the cache was indeed missing, so he replaced it with another one he'd had in his car. He had been intending on giving it to us, but instead, gave us a couple others that he had made using his 3D printer. And so I have a cache container that looks like an oak acorn and another one that looks like a pine cone. They are my souvenirs from South Dakota geocaching.
The next day we left South Dakota behind and headed into Minnesota and Iowa, spending the next night in northern Iowa in Mason City.
Looking back on this blog, I realize that I haven't covered all the spots my youngest and I visited on our cross country road trip to Wisconsin the summer of 2017. With extra time on my hands at this point in time, I might as well get back to that trip and let you know about spots we visited on the way to Wisconsin as well as spots visited on the return trip. When I last wrote about this trip, it was July last year and I wrote about Mt. Rushmore. Right after that I ended up taking an extended camping trip to Utah, Idaho and Nevada, so I got caught up in that trip. Since I've covered that trip pretty extensively on this blog, it's time to revisit the 2017 trip.
Following our quick two hour visit to Mt. Rushmore, we headed south into Custer State Park and then into Wind Cave National Park. The two parks boast broad sweeping vistas, bison herds, but Wind Cave also has an underground cavern that's open for tours. We ended up driving through the state park in order to get to the national park. If you look at the first photo, you'll see there's a fence at the border between the two parks. Most animals can either burrow under the fence or hop over the fence so animal movement is not really impaired with the exception of the bison herds. There's a reason for this fence and that's to keep the two herds in the parks separate.
The bison herd in Wind Cave is a genetically pure strain of bison. Most bison in the United States, are genetically mixed with cattle. The herd in Yellowstone National Park and the one in Wind Cave are genetically pure, so it's advantageous to keep the strain a pure strain for the future of the overall species. This is why there's a fence around the entire Wind Cave park. The bison herds in Custer State Park, are not genetically pure and the National Park Service wants to keep the two herds separate for reasons explained above. The entire herd in Wind Cave are direct descendants from Yellowstone bison that had been captured in 1800s and then bred in the Brooklyn Zoo in New York. The herds in this area had been pretty much wiped out during the late 1800s, and when the park was created, offspring from the Brooklyn Zoo bison were reintroduced into Wind Cave National Park. Every year after calving, the herd is rounded up and culled, with some of the offspring sent to other areas in order to keep a genetically diverse line of bison. The photo of the bison was actually taken in Custer State Park as we didn't see any of the Wind Cave herd while we were there, so I'm actually glad that we ended up taking the scenic route through Custer.
Once inside the national park, we headed to the visitors center and purchased tickets to take one of the tours that were offered that afternoon. The cave is composed of over 100 miles of passageways, 3000 different chambers, the largest of which is larger than the largest room in Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. Cave popcorn, frostwork and box-work are the main types of formations in this cave, giving it a much different feel than many of the more traditional caverns like Mammoth Cave and Carlsbad Caverns. There aren't nearly as many imposing structures like you would see in other caves, but each cave is unique in its own right and it's one of the reasons I enjoy exploring caves - the differences that make each one unique.
I had been here once when I was a teenager and the main thing I remember of this cave was the Post Office, a formation of calcite that created something that looked literally like a set of post office boxes. You can see something similar to that in the last photo.
Following our tour of the cave, we came back out and encountered a gathering thunderstorm, which meant that our planned hike above ground would have to be curtailed and we decided to get back in the Jeep and head back to Rapid City where we would be spending the night. Nothing like driving through a torrential rain storm with thunder and lightning all around and hail falling down. Fortunately, it wasn't a really violent storm, so the hail stones were small and didn't dent the car.
In the coming weeks, I intend to continue with this series, taking you to Badlands National Park, the Gateway arch in St. Louis, the Buddy Holly memorial in Iowa, and three different presidential libraries. Thanks for stopping by.
As noted in my last post, I don't claim to be a bird expert. I have a book that I rely on for most of my identifications and when I can't figure out what I've seen with my camera, I turn to several people on-line who I know are more well versed than I in identifying birds. What I have noticed during my daily walks is there seems to be a lot more birds out and about. It's either that, or I'm just more aware of them because I'm walking nearly the same route every day now.
Before "shelter in place" I would do more of a hike than a neighborhood walk. I saw things, but because of the areas I would walk I can honestly say I wasn't looking for the subtle beauty of small birds, but more likely the overall beauty of a landscape shot. That's one thing I've been working on since this confinement took hold. I've not been able to hike my normal routes, so I've found other areas that I know have wildlife and go back to those repeatedly in the hopes of getting some good shots, like this shot I took a couple of weeks ago of a lesser goldfinch.
I've actually learned where I can find certain birds. I know where the western bluebirds hang out and can usually get a shot or two every day I go there. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a pair of spotted towhees and a friend of mine told me they are usually heard, not seen, so I guess I was lucky. Except that I now know what their call sounds like and it actually alerted me to their being around. Because I've become more aware of bird calls, I now know what spotted towhees sound like and I've been able to get photos of them more than once.
This morning, I spotted this California scrub jay as it was searching the area for food. I'm not sure if that's a peanut that someone left, or if it's just a large seed from a nearby plant, but I learned today that these kinds of jays can still vocalize quite well, even with food in their bills. It gives an entirely different meaning to "don't talk with your mouth full."
The jays tend to hangout in a certain spot in the neighborhood. Multiple times I've gone back to a certain spot and found several scrub jays hanging out looking for food. The mockingbirds and sparrows, on the other hand, seem to be just about anywhere and my wanderings have also alerted me to where a nest of acorn woodpeckers are. I have seen the mother and father coming to and fro from the hole in the top of this particular tree and I've heard the babies every time either parent shows up with a mouthful of food, but I have not been able to get a shot of them yet. They are pretty quick and the hole in the top of the tree is difficult to spot. I think I need to bring a ladder out sometime to get me closer to the action, but I think the neighbors might find that a little strange, especially since the tree is a couple of blocks away from where I live.
Suffice to say, you might expect to see more bird photos in the next couple of posts, mainly because I'm getting a lot of birds at the moment.
