Happy SNOWY New Year! At least here in Clayton County . . . Nearly all December we waited. Where is the snow? The few skiffs we had weren’t enough to appease the kids who wanted to sled, the sentimentalists who’d hoped for a white Christmas, or the deer hunters who needed white ground for better […]
The turkey vultures and killdeers arrived weeks ago. The Canada goose already is on her nest on the island in the pond. Song sparrows have been singing cheerily for days. Waterfowl – ducks, geese, pelicans, coots – are funneling north along the Mississippi. Many goldfinches have turned mostly gold again, shedding their drab-green winter plumage.
I thought it was APRIL! Read More »
With the temperature soaring into the 60s, wave after wave of snow, blue, and white-fronted geese streamed north and northwest during the last couple of days in February, paying no heed to the human calendar. “One swallow does not make a summer,” wrote Burlington native Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac, “but one skein
Majestic pines. Pristine lakes. Rugged portages. Eagles and loons and ravens and gray jays and red-breasted nuthatches. Billion-years-old bedrock and cliffs and boulders. The satisfaction of traveling under your own power, staying dry and comfortable in a tent you pitched yourself, and eating around a campfire. A recent canoe trip to Minnesota’s 1.1-million-acre Boundary Waters
Back to the Boundary Waters! Read More »
Maybe it was those April showers that unleashed the headlong rush into the delights of spring. Before we knew it, the early hepaticas and spring beauties gave way to toothwort and anemonella and May apples and the emerging shoots of young oaks and maples and Virginia creeper. Thickets of wild plums burst into fragrant bloom
Thanks to the showers . . . Read More »
The season “officially arrived” a couple of weeks ago. And even before that, the red-winged blackbirds had tried to push winter north in late February. Not until the first hepatica blooms will I concede that winter has passed, however. Thus, we poked among the leaves on the north slope, enjoying the early-April warmth, hoping to
Sad. There, grotesquely sprawled in the snow, lay our national symbol. The adult bald eagle apparently had been dead for some time. It had fallen near the Turkey River, hidden at the base of a bluff. A friend just happened to find it while exploring a remote valley. How could it happen? Surely no poacher
The tragedy of lead . . . Read More »
“A quiet crowd,” mused Dale Garner, pondering the nearly 400 people crowded into Johnson’s Reception Hall in Elkader Perhaps the hunters, landowners, and others who’d come to learn more about the recent discovery of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in Clayton County were simply resigned to the fact that the deadly deer disease had arrived. With
CWD Clouds the Future of Iowa Whitetails Read More »
Variety – is the spice of deer hunting. What fun would it be if all a hunter had to do is wait patiently for an hour or two, shoot a deer, and be done for the season? The reality is, well, never what you expect. You heard a pileated woodpecker – but did
Grandson Isaac and I were thinking “turkey” as we quietly sneaked along the ridge on the way to our chosen spot to sit and wait. But Isaac’s young eyes spotted a patch of gray that said “deer” instead. We froze and watched briefly before the huge buck sensed us and bounded away. We both
That’s why they call it “hunting” . . . Read More »