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Some Stories from Hawk Ridge
Sep. 26th, 2010 10:59 pmI want to do a long post with pictures, but for the time being here are some stories from my weekend. (I have already posted a bunch of the pictures on Facebook, but they take much longer to upload here.)
- I arrived at the ridge on Saturday afternoon, around the time that migration is usually starting to wind down for the day. I decided to go incognito, and leave my volunteer badge off, since I wasn't on the schedule. It was kind of weird to be there in tourist mode - I've gotten used to being there to talk to people about hawk ridge, and help point out birds, and tell people to move off the road when they're in the way of a car trying to get by. I think I prefer that to just standing around and watching birds, as much as I like doing even just that. While I was there, they banded a peregrine falcon. It was the first time I'd seen one in hand, and it was much smaller than I thought it would be!
- Late Saturday afternoon I made my way to Jay Cooke to see about getting a campsite. My timing was fortuitous - they had been booked but had just had someone depart early. While I was waiting for them to double check that the campsite was vacated, a middle aged woman came in by herself looking for a site. They gave her a list of other campsites in the area and sent her off to use the courtesy phone. I have a really small tent - it doesn't take up even half of the tent spot on Jay Cooke's sites, so after I had the campsite registration I walked next door and offered to share my site with her, if she had a small tent. She did and she took me up on it, and we ended up sharing our dinners and chatting at the picnic table for a while. She was heading off for a week in Tettegouche State Park.
- Saturday night I headed back to Hawk Ridge for the owl program. No sooner did I arrive than the naturalist handed me the radio and asked me to run owls if the banding station got any. I ended up doing a run to the banding station where they had six little saw-whet owls at once. There was cute everywhere I looked! I got to carry two of them back.
- I feel weird about talking about owls as tame *at all*, but saw-whet's kind of act tame when they're in the hand. They're docile and like having their heads petted. (They close their eyes and tilt their head around, a lot like my parrot.) They have the softest feathers ever.
- Today we had a lot of low flying birds, including a merlin that came and perched up in a tree close in, a pair of sandhill cranes, and about 50 turkey vultures that streamed past all in a long row.
- I arrived at the ridge on Saturday afternoon, around the time that migration is usually starting to wind down for the day. I decided to go incognito, and leave my volunteer badge off, since I wasn't on the schedule. It was kind of weird to be there in tourist mode - I've gotten used to being there to talk to people about hawk ridge, and help point out birds, and tell people to move off the road when they're in the way of a car trying to get by. I think I prefer that to just standing around and watching birds, as much as I like doing even just that. While I was there, they banded a peregrine falcon. It was the first time I'd seen one in hand, and it was much smaller than I thought it would be!
- Late Saturday afternoon I made my way to Jay Cooke to see about getting a campsite. My timing was fortuitous - they had been booked but had just had someone depart early. While I was waiting for them to double check that the campsite was vacated, a middle aged woman came in by herself looking for a site. They gave her a list of other campsites in the area and sent her off to use the courtesy phone. I have a really small tent - it doesn't take up even half of the tent spot on Jay Cooke's sites, so after I had the campsite registration I walked next door and offered to share my site with her, if she had a small tent. She did and she took me up on it, and we ended up sharing our dinners and chatting at the picnic table for a while. She was heading off for a week in Tettegouche State Park.
- Saturday night I headed back to Hawk Ridge for the owl program. No sooner did I arrive than the naturalist handed me the radio and asked me to run owls if the banding station got any. I ended up doing a run to the banding station where they had six little saw-whet owls at once. There was cute everywhere I looked! I got to carry two of them back.
- I feel weird about talking about owls as tame *at all*, but saw-whet's kind of act tame when they're in the hand. They're docile and like having their heads petted. (They close their eyes and tilt their head around, a lot like my parrot.) They have the softest feathers ever.
- Today we had a lot of low flying birds, including a merlin that came and perched up in a tree close in, a pair of sandhill cranes, and about 50 turkey vultures that streamed past all in a long row.
