Albatrossity

On the Road: Week of December 14  (5 am)
Albatrossity – October in the Sandhills #2
way2blue – Peloponnese, Greece
?BillinGlendaleCA – Aerochrome
Captain C – Goes To Japan: Second Tokyo 1
Steve from Mendocino – Reed College

We have a few more days of Parks After Dark.

On the Road: Parks After Dark: Week of December 14  (10 pm)
ljt – More Parks
way2blue – Cairngorms National Parks, Scotland
Yvonne – Denali from Wonder Lake
Origuy – Road Trip 2006 Part One
Paul in St. Augustine – A National Park Here, a National Park There

?  And now, back to Albatrossity, for his last October post in the Sandhills, at least for awhile.

Albatrossity

Our few days in the Nebraska Sandhills in October were full of scenic vistas and birds. Here are a few more images from our mid-October trip to the Hutton Niobrara Ranch Wildlife Sanctuary in north-central Nebraska.

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Albatrossity

In mid-October, when COVID-weariness and ZOOM-aversion seemed to be peaking (how little we knew then), Elizabeth and I made another 6-hour trip to the Hutton Niobrara Ranch Wildlife Sanctuary in far north-central Nebraska. Even though Kansas and Nebraska were hot zones for COVID at the time, we can make this trip, stay a few days at the guest house where we can cook all of our own food, and get back without seeing anyone else except at the gas station on the way and way back. I had never seen fall in the Sandhills of Nebraska, and Elizabeth was anxious to get out of the house, so we headed north. Here are some images from that trip; there will be another batch next week as well.

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Albatrossity

This is the last set in this series, as fall is slowly giving way to winter here in flyover country, with migration slowing down and winter residents settling in. To me much of the joy in fall migration is the return of our winter hawks, a diverse mix of Red-tailed Hawk subspecies, falcons, and the occasional Rough-legged Hawk. I have yet to see the latter this season, but here are some pics of some of the others, as well as a winter-resident sparrow or two.

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Albatrossity

The end of October is usually a good week for migration in Kansas, and this year was no exception. My trip to Quivira NWR on Oct 30 let me arrive at dawn to see two Whooping Cranes amidst a gazillion ducks and geese, as well as about 30,000 Sandhill Cranes. Which was very timely because I had agreed to do a video presentation for the Celebration of Cranes for Audubon of Kansas, and I needed some images and video!

If you want to see that presentation, it is on YouTube , a video of Whooping Cranes at Dawn is here, and a video of Sandhill Cranes by the thousands is here.

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Albatrossity

A second batch of images from excursions here and there in Kansas this fall. These are again mostly from Quivira National Wildlife Refuge in central KS, taking advantage of the dawn light on those marshes.

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Albatrossity

Like spring, fall is a great season for bird photography in the middle of the country, with the added bonus that there are lots more young birds who hatched out in the summer and are now heading south for the first time. And fall landscapes can be gorgeous as well. So here are some images (more to come next week) from my time in the world during this pandemic fall season in flyover country.

There is very little public land in Kansas, so I have to travel a bit to find birdy places where I can photograph birds. Fortunately one of those places is Quivira National Wildlife Refuge, which is, in my opinion, one of the best federal refuges in the country for photographers. It is, however, about three hours away from my home, so if I want to be there for the sunrise (and I do), I need to leave the house around 4:30 AM or so. I managed to do that several times this season, and it was well worth it. Many of these images are from those day trips, with a few other more local images mixed in.

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Albatrossity in Scotland

Our final days in Scotland were spent near Edinburgh, although we didn’t get into the city since there was some large festival going on at the time and it seemed to be a zoo. On the way down to Edinburgh from Aberdeen we stopped and visited an ancestral site. My great-grandfather was born there, but when he was a young man in the mid 19th century, he emigrated to America. We shared a first name as well. My cousin,who is a dedicated family genealogist, researched the records and found the home site near Kinross in Perthshire. So we were armed with a map, and we proceeded to seek out that site and get some pictures to send to the rest of the family.

The ancestral estate name apparently dates back to the 1300’s, when the name was spelled Rentowle. What was left at the time we visited was a run-down barn and a sealed up two-story house. It is not clear if my great grandfather was born in this structure, but he was baptized in Orwell Parish in Milnathort, about three miles east of this site. A look at the most recent Google Earth images (from June 2018 and March 2020) would indicate that these structures have been leveled and something else is being constructed on the site.

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