by Peter Walker
Growing up in a very rural area of Maine, having other kids to play with was the exception, not the rule. My social skills were slow to develop. Rural grade school was okay; but high school in the city was absolutely painful. Scholastically I was placed in the same classes with the A-list kids. But being an outsider and the son of a plumber, they were never going to cut me any slack socially. To make matters worse, I had the physical coordination and athletic ability of a top-heavy rock. I couldn’t make the B-list either.
By my junior year in high school I reached my full height of an even 6 feet. My legs were so short I wore pants with a 29-inch leg. My torso was so long I could not wear a hat while sitting in a car. I was a giant penguin!
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Farmington, Maine. In the week since I arrived we’ve only seen sunshine twice, and then for only 2-3 hours at a time! Consequently I’ve only taken my camera out of its case a few times. Despite my inability to do any long-term birding, I’ve picked up a lot of species as incidentals or on short forays here in Farmington around my brother Tom’s place and at my brother David’s camp in the Rangeley country.
I bought a Maine nonresident fishing license and managed to go trolling on Beaver Mountain Pond in drizzle on two occasions. It was my first time sport fishing in years. I caught 8 landlocked Atlantic salmon and one brook trout, none of which were legal minimum length – but lots of fun just the same. Read more…
I began the week in Morgan County, Colorado. Now I am in Farmington, Maine some 2,500 miles to the northeast. I arrived here on Friday afternoon and it has hardly stopped raining ever since. On Saturday the sun came out for 3-4 hours in the afternoon and I got out and hiked through mature mixed forest long enough to pick up the songs and a few sightings of some old friends. I’ll be here two more weeks and hope to get out and do some serious birding if the weather ever breaks.
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The plains pricklypear (Opuntia polycantha) is very abundant in northeast Colorado growing in a variety of habitats. Most of the year it is ignored by the general public. But in June each year the plains pricklypear asserts itself by coloring the prairie with an amazing array of ornate blossoms ranging from brilliant yellow to a sort of glowing pink to deep pink. The breathtaking show lasts perhaps three weeks and is followed by dark red fruits around the tips of the pads. Both the fruits and pads are edible but must be singed to remove the spines before they can be handled. Coronado and other early explorers of the Llano Estacado in Texas found little to eat except the pricklypear, the staple diet of Native Americans in the region. Read more…
CDOW FISHERY BIOLOGIST BEN SWIGLE (CTR) AND SUMMER ASSISTANTS HOIST TWO FRESHWATER DRUM AND TWO HYBRID STRIPED BASS SAMPLED FROM PAWNEE POWER PLANT RESERVOIR IN MORGAN COUNTY, COLORADO. BOTH DRUM PROBABLY EXCEED THE OFFICIAL STATE ANGLING RECORD.
It was a great week to be outdoors. It only rained once or twice in Morgan County (a far cry from the previous 10-12 weeks!). My work took me inside the chain-link fences surrounding Pawnee Power Station near Brush to collect virus inspection samples from warm- and coolwater fishes in Pawnee Reservoir. That gave me a look at whatever water birds might be using the 140-acre lake at this time of the year. I found about a dozen western and Clark’s grebes – non-breeders, I presume. Aside from those, there were only white pelicans and double-crested cormorants present.
I did get an audible on a warbling vireo in the treetops of the cottonwood groves just south of the lake. It is only the first one I’ve come across all year. Can anyone tell me if the decrease is range-wide and why? Read more…
It was an average birding week at the height of breeding season. It will be a week or two yet before the first fall migrants and post-breeding dispersal juveniles show up from other areas. It continues to rain almost every day – something we haven’t seen in these parts for a number of years. Prairie playas that have been dry for a decade or more are now full of water. It should make for a great shorebird migration.
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A week ago I was tied to my desk all week. This week I spent four days at least in part in the field. Although none of that time was devoted specifically to birding, it did yield a good-sized list of “incidentals.”
Monday afternoon and early evening I rode with District Wildlife Manager (translation: Colorado game warden) Todd Cozad of Fort Morgan. His duties took him south into an oilfield in Washington County, then northeastward to Jackson Lake State Park to assist two young field technicians from my program, Ellen Hayes and Brian Heinold, as they took samples in their search for invasive zebra and quagga mussels. Read more…
BIRDING LIST – MAY 25-30, 2009
It was a week spent catching up on work. I did not make any trips, just my commutes back and forth through ten miles of irrigated farm land between my house and my lab. Yesterday, however, Joe Rigli and I set out on a morning’s birding north of Fort Morgan, only to be sidetracked for an hour or so by the strange-looking airplane at “FMX” (see following story).
The prairie in northeast Colorado is lush green due to the cool, very wet spring. This season’s stars so far are patches of a very showy white evening primrose which appear to be patches of snow from a distance and look more like scattered white tissues as you get closer.
Here is my week list:
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THEY CALL HER “DOUBLE UGLY”
Peter Walker
What would you get if you put wings on a combine? The result couldn’t be much uglier than the funny-looking twin-engine airplane that spent a great deal of time at the Fort Morgan Airport Saturday morning practicing landings and takeoffs.
The unmarked grayish aircraft, it turns out, is a recent acquisition of the United States Air Force. Four young pilots from the 318th Special Operations Squadron at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico have been assigned to familiarize themselves with the special plane. Read more…
by Peter Walker
(Maine whitetail photo by David Walker)
One of my favorite game warden stories was told to me years after the fact over cups of coffee with two of the three Maine wardens involved in the caper. Roger and Danny were in the same Maine Warden Service training class in the early 1970s. As the end of several months of training drew near, they spent more and more time in the field being mentored by experienced district officers.
The fall night of their big adventure, the two were assigned to patrol for night hunters in eastern Maine under the tutelage of Eric, a tall, gruff, deep-voiced veteran of the Maine Warden Service. The three were sitting in the dark in a pickup truck pulled into the edge of the woods off a large field. The field was well off the highway and accessible via a one-lane woods road.
Catching “deer jackers,” as they are known in Maine, is a game of patience. It takes long hours of sitting quietly, waiting for the bad guys to make a move. Even then you must witness them at least using a spotlight in order to make a pinch. In Maine, the fields are carved from dense woodlands. So that narrows the playing field a bit for the game wardens just as it concentrates the whitetails for the poachers. Read more…
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