This time they really were wild geese I was looking for. Sal del Rey, NWR. Snow geese and greater white fronted geese reported there the day before. These geese are winter residents and we see them every year, but we missed them at the beginning of the year this year because I was being good after neck surgery. (We stayed home the first couple months so I wouldn’t be craning my neck to see birds.) I hiked in to the refuge and looked. No geese. Last night at sundown I was stationed an hour away from home by the road at Sacahuistale Flats outside Port Mansfield watching and listening for a ferruginous pygmy owl that had been seen there a couple days before. Nada. Still at 407 for the year. Woke this morning before dawn by thunder claps. Hoping that wasn’t a bad omen for election day. Cool and rainy. Barely went outside. Suffering election stress. Watching returns. No relief yet. I suspect we’ll be up late.
Here is the problem
We wanted a cart on wheels to put the smoker on. We found a nice mechanic’s seat online and bought it. It’s the right height. It’s sturdy. It will hold the weight. It has nice big wheels so it rolls easily. When I unpacked the cart, it had a seat cushion on it. The seat cushion had a strong chemical perfumed smell; like Febreze. (I find the smell of Febreze nauseating.) So we threw the seat cushion away, but the fragrance didn’t go away. The hard plastic of the top shelf of the cart had absorbed the odor. No way I’m going to put the smoker on top of that cart, throw a cover over the whole setup, then later slow cook a brisket, only to find that the smoker has been infused with the smell of Febreze and that’s what the food tastes like. We washed the cart with vinegar and let it sit. We washed it with bleach and let it sit. We left it in the sun. No bueno. We’ve had it a month. Here it sits, banished to the thicket behind the house, the top tray filled with coffee grounds, exposed to the weather, testing how long it will take for the smell to subside.
Immigrants
We argue the merits of immigration; the morality; the practicality. We are a nation of immigrants. One way or another though, immigrants come, they assimilate to form the new American identity, and then get to be the next generation of citizens deciding how they feel about immigrants. On a broader scale, our hemisphere wasn’t always occupied by humans. Land plants evolved about 500 million years ago. Land animals arrived from the sea about 350 million years ago. So for about 350 million years, North and South America were only populated by plants and animals while homo-sapiens evolved elsewhere in only the last 200,000 years or so. Somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago, these modern humans migrated across the Bering land bridge from Asia, (North America was connected to Asia) then wandered from north to south and spread east. The first 99.996% of the time that there have been plants and animals on the North and South American Continents, there were no humans. None. In only that last 0.004% of time have there been humans expanding their range across the continents. We know it wasn’t always pastoral; this human occupation of the Americas. Tribal rivalries pushed boundaries and borders back and forth. Societies rose and fell. But by the time the Europeans arrived, the continent was covered with Native American Nations. The Huron, the Iroquois. The Erie and the Shawnee. The southern Cherokee, Chicksaw, and Choctaw. The Dakota Sioux, the Cree. The plains Blackfoot, Crow, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Arapahoe, Kiowa. Mountain Flathead, Shoshone, and Ute. The desert Hopi, Navaho, Apache. Coastal Chinook, Yurok, Pomo tribes out west. North of us the Inuit, Yupik, and the Aleut. South of us, the Tamaulipec, Toltec, Aztec, Inca. Countless tribes and nations. Many more tribes than can be named here. Then the Americas were “discovered”. An extended wave of European immigration over a period of centuries, to a land already occupied by Native Americans. The Native Americans had been here for thousands of years, so it would have seemed to them that they had always been here and always would be. How must that have felt to have people from somewhere else arrive on your shores, declare they had just discovered your land, and claim it as their own? The immigration from Europe became an immigration from all over the world, not all of it even voluntary. We’re the world’s melting pot; this wave of non-native Americans having been here for about 400 years, roughly 2% of the time that Native Americans have been here; here we stand, ironically, debating the morality of immigration. Should we allow it or shouldn’t we? And that leads me to this. There are still Native Americans here now. You know they can hear us, right? Don’t we feel at least a little embarrassed?
It wasn’t a wild goose chase
We were after a duck. Jon texted us about a Eurasian Wigeon at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, seen from the Osprey Overlook. We’ve seen plenty of *American* Wigeons. They look like this:
(not my photo) We’ve never seen a *Eurasian* Wigeon though. That would be a lifer. The Eurasian Wigeon looks like this:
(not my photo) Look at those two ducks. They should be really easy to tell apart. Yeah. How hard could it be? We grabbed our binoculars and drove an hour and a half to the Osprey Overlook. Here is what we saw:
See those dark streaks on the water? Those are rafts of ducks. Thousands and thousands of ducks. There are a dozen different varieties. We need to pick out the one duck that is not like the others. Through the binoculars it looked more like this:
A lot of ducks. Through the long-lens of my camera it looked like this:
Now at least, we could see that there were individual ducks.
It was hopeless. Lucky for us though, there were more than a dozen other birders there searching for the duck; a half-dozen of those birders with high quality scopes. I have a scope, but not like that. Our impulse to go find the duck turned into a stakeout, with people tapping in and out on the scopes, scanning rafts of ducks for that one slightly different bird. Judy waited in the car with the air-conditioning on, listening to the second half of the Texas, Texas Tech game. After two hours, one birder, Dan Jones, said “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I might have something here. YES. I’ve got the bird!” “Wait a minute, it’s gone. No there it is; I’ve got it again. Nope. Gone again.” It was that elusive, bobbing up and down in the distance in the middle of a thousand other ducks. Every other person with a scope tried to get on it. Only one person, Derek, ever did. But one by one, each birder took turns stepping up to the scopes looking until they located it, then stepping away so someone else would have a chance. Birders are good like that. You only look through the scope long enough to I.D. a bird, then you step away to give everyone else a chance. Once everyone has seen it, you can go back for a longer look. Everyone got the bird, including Judy who came back from the car when I texted her. For us, Judy and me, ABA lifer number 612. Year bird number 407, an exact tie with our best-ever year in 2012.
(not my photo) We’ve never seen a *Eurasian* Wigeon though. That would be a lifer. The Eurasian Wigeon looks like this:(not my photo) Look at those two ducks. They should be really easy to tell apart. Yeah. How hard could it be? We grabbed our binoculars and drove an hour and a half to the Osprey Overlook. Here is what we saw: See those dark streaks on the water? Those are rafts of ducks. Thousands and thousands of ducks. There are a dozen different varieties. We need to pick out the one duck that is not like the others. Through the binoculars it looked more like this:A lot of ducks. Through the long-lens of my camera it looked like this: Now at least, we could see that there were individual ducks. It was hopeless. Lucky for us though, there were more than a dozen other birders there searching for the duck; a half-dozen of those birders with high quality scopes. I have a scope, but not like that. Our impulse to go find the duck turned into a stakeout, with people tapping in and out on the scopes, scanning rafts of ducks for that one slightly different bird. Judy waited in the car with the air-conditioning on, listening to the second half of the Texas, Texas Tech game. After two hours, one birder, Dan Jones, said “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I might have something here. YES. I’ve got the bird!” “Wait a minute, it’s gone. No there it is; I’ve got it again. Nope. Gone again.” It was that elusive, bobbing up and down in the distance in the middle of a thousand other ducks. Every other person with a scope tried to get on it. Only one person, Derek, ever did. But one by one, each birder took turns stepping up to the scopes looking until they located it, then stepping away so someone else would have a chance. Birders are good like that. You only look through the scope long enough to I.D. a bird, then you step away to give everyone else a chance. Once everyone has seen it, you can go back for a longer look. Everyone got the bird, including Judy who came back from the car when I texted her. For us, Judy and me, ABA lifer number 612. Year bird number 407, an exact tie with our best-ever year in 2012. Progress report
A recent visit to the motorhome reveals progress. The top has been done. The rear end has been done.
All the running lights will be replaced with fresh new ones. Jacinto is working his way around the lower part counter-clockwise. The entire right side, the door, and the door frame have been repaired and primed.
One color, the beige, has been completed, with two more colors to go.
There isn’t a piece of chrome to be found on the entire bus. Every chrome handle, latch, and bracket; they’re all in Mexico.
All the running lights will be replaced with fresh new ones. Jacinto is working his way around the lower part counter-clockwise. The entire right side, the door, and the door frame have been repaired and primed. One color, the beige, has been completed, with two more colors to go. There isn’t a piece of chrome to be found on the entire bus. Every chrome handle, latch, and bracket; they’re all in Mexico.