Albatrossity

I am invariably asked “What’s your favorite bird?” whenever I give talks to elementary or middle school students, so I posed that question to a few fascists. Here are their responses!

On The Road – Albatrossity – Favorite BirdsPost + Comments (36)

It’s Albatrossity Monday!  Then we take the last of the 2022 trips with frosty and finish up the week with our 2nd day in Quebec with Argiope.

I don’t have anything else in the queue after this week, so unless some On the Road submissions arrive, it looks like we could be taking a break.  OTR submissions tend to ebb and flow – usually we have about 4 weeks in the queue.   Occasionally the queue is just a couple of weeks out, and sometimes we have so many that it can take 2 months or more to see yours published.  But in the 4 years since i took this on, we have never run this close to running on empty.

We’ll see what this week brings!

(click the image below for a bigger, non-blurry version of the schedule for this week)

Albatrossity

Back to our excursion westward in 2015, after a brief detour for Sandhill Cranes last Monday.

On The Road – Albatrossity – Westward 2015, week 2Post + Comments (20)

Looks like we have a beautiful week ahead!

(click below for a bigger, non-blurry version)

Albatrossity

Last weekend Elizabeth and I, as well as three of the students in her Wild Literature class, traveled to Nebraska to view the greatest wildlife migration spectacle in North America, one million Sandhill Cranes massing along the Platte River and bulking up before they continue their journey to Alaska, Canada, and Siberia. I have made this journey many times in the past, but, like the cranes, somehow I have an urge to return year after year after year. It was a good trip, so I’ll take a brief hiatus from chronicling our westward trip in 2015, and pick that up again next week.

On The Road – Albatrossity – Cranes along the Platte River, 2024Post + Comments (18)

It’s Albatrossity Monday, and then it looks like we have some great trips ahead of us this week.

(click to see a bigger, non-blurry version)

Albatrossity

Eight years after our trip to see the solstice sunrise at the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, we found ourselves there again, and again at the time of the solstice. Elizabeth was heading to a literary conference in Moscow Idaho, and a drive across some blue highways was a getaway for me. So here are some more pics from the high Bighorn Mountains at the beginning of alpine summer there, to be followed by more pics as we headed west toward Idaho.

On The Road – Albatrossity – Westward 2015, week 1Post + Comments (13)

Update: Forgot to include the rest of the schedule for the week!

Albatrossity

After the 2007 solstice sunrise at the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, we spent another couple of days camping and sight-seeing in the Bighorn Mountains and surrounding country. I did not keep a diary, and my camera at the time did not have GPS capability, so some of these recollections are a bit hazy. I guess I need to go back there and poke around some more!

On The Road – Albatrossity – Bighorn Mountains – 2Post + Comments (18)

We’re traveling all over this week; it should be fun!

If you’ve been thinking of submitting some pictures, now would be a great time to do it.  We’re filled up next week, but wide open after that, so this is your chance to have your stuff show up within a week or two.

(click on the schedule below for a bigger, non-blurry version)

Albatrossity

Today’s excursion started back in 2007, with a trip to the Bighorn Medicine Wheel on Medicine Mountain in Wyoming. Elizabeth was researching an essay for her next book, and I was, per usual, along for the ride. We wanted to see the summer solstice sunrise at the site of the Medicine Wheel, so we headed up there in June 2007. Her essay about this experience, entitled “Geochronicity”, appears in Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World; a shorter version of that essay was also published in Orion in 2008, and is available online. If you want some background about the site and its history, I’d suggest reading the essay before proceeding. Her words illuminate and magnify the experience far better than mine, but I can at least offer some photographs and my own perspective.

Exactly 8 years later we found ourselves in the Bighorns again, enroute to a literary conference in Moscow, Idaho. So this will be a two part experience; today’s and next week’s posts about the 2007 trip, and then several posts about the second visit, as part of a longer road trip travelogue. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed going back through the images, processing them with more modern software tools, and re-living those experiences anew.

On The Road – Albatrossity – The Bighorns – 1Post + Comments (14)

It’s Albatrossity Monday!  We have two bonus OTR posts from the Sinai Trail, and finish up the week with two gorgeous parks.

(click to see the larger, non-blurry version)

Albatrossity

After leaving the San Luis Valley of Colorado and heading west, I basically drove two days across a lot of gorgeous country, without stopping to look at birds, and ended up in Monterey CA the day before a planned pelagic birding trip with Debi Shearwater and company. A bunch of birders, dosed with Dramamine, piled onto a dock in the Monterey Harbor a bit before dawn on Sunday 9/8/2019, where we were told that the trip had been cancelled due to weather (25 ft. waves and such). There were no opportunities for rebooking; there was only one more planned trip that fall, and it was already full, and none were scheduled for the next year because Debi was retiring. We got our money back, but the disappointment was profound.

Another Kansas birder, a friend of mine from Wichita, was also there, also disappointed, and wondering what to do for the day. He is a dedicated lister, and was hoping to see some species that he had not seen before, as he closed in on the magic number of 700 species seen in North America. The only other non-oceanic lifer possibility for him in the area was Mountain Quail, and that would require a trip up into the higher elevations of the coastal mountains above Carmel. It was also another potential wild goose (or quail) chase, since that is a secretive bird and never abundant, even in places where it is known to hang out. But I had a car, we had the day, and we headed up. I took the camera, but really didn’t use it for much, since my bird photography technique is to find a place, sit still for a while, and see what shows up. That’s tough to do while driving on windy dusty mountain roads, with another person around, especially one who was focused on finding a single species!

On The Road – Albatrossity – Westward 2019, installment 2Post + Comments (25)