The past week in snapshots, starting with Thursday, June 24th, when I went to the farm, and stopped at a hot dog stand in Reedsburg on the way back.

Then I kayaked the Baraboo River--and explored some tributaries.


On Friday, June 25th I drove up to Necedah National Wildlife Refuge where I looked for cranes four times a day--sunrise, 11 am, 4 pm and sunset--on Saturday and Sunday.

Sometimes I found them (look in the corner of the slice of water).

On Monday, June 28th I was back at ICF, and had to check on the chicks at night. This is Nacho, our oldest.

And Feta, one of our youngest.

And today I went to Devil's Lake.

Oh, and we caught a baby ground squirrel in the driveway.

Today I wanted to go kayaking, but the sky kept threatening rain (and it did, occasionally, rain) so my desires went unfulfilled (but tomorrow! tomorrow will be glorious). So I road my bike less than a mile to investigate a mysterious park-like location (it turned out to be a rode for Yellowthunder, a chief of the Ho-Chunk Tribe who lived from 1774-1874), loafed around with a book, and watched "180° South" on Netflix. I enjoyed the movie more than I expected to, so I recommend it to you--not as something great, but as a pretty good movie that combines an environmental message with a watchable adventure story. I agree with the message, and I think it's presented in a more evenhanded, approachable manner than "An Inconvenient Truth." Added bonus: see "180° South" in conjunction with "The Motorcycle Diaries," and you practically took a trip to Chile right there. It also has a pleasant (pleasant is really the only word to describe it) soundtrack with an unexpected cover of a Greg Brown song by Jack Johnson.

Also, my blog layout woes have been fixed, and I made myself a new background and header to boot. I'm not sure how I feel about the background, so that may disappear shortly, but the header is staying for sure.

p.s. I accidentally changed the template of this blog and can't seem to get it back to the original--which is unfortunate. This will do for a little while, but I don't like it as well--so I'll be working on something else.

I didn't take this picture--my boss did. But this is Gouda, our 3rd chick (out of, as of now, ten--it's getting hectic), on June 4th. And this is a pretty good idea of what a chick run looks like when the chick is young: marbles in the water, brood model (that's a stuffed swan with a plastic whooper head attached), thermometer, food, green mats, heat lamps. The life of an isolation-reared whooping crane--not much like the marsh. (The marbles are to make the water shiny, and to help the chick get out if it falls in.)

I think I'm going to give Wednesday poemday a rest. But I'll try to post something on Wednesdays. Like these pictures.

June 6, 2008

July 15, 2009

May 26, 2010

For a wordier walk down memory lane (from me, but including some memories not my own), I'll direct you here.

Starting the Subaru at Five Below

After 6 Maine winters and 100,000 miles,
when I take it to be inspected

I search for gas stations where they
just say beep the horn and don't ask me to

put it on the lift, exposing its soft
rusted underbelly. Inside is the record

of commuting: apple cores, a bag from
McDonald's, crushed Dunkin' Donuts cups,

A flashlight that doesn't work and one
That does, gas receipts blurred beyond

recognition. Finger tips numb, nose
hair frozen, I pump the accelerator

and turn the key. The battery cranks,
the engine gives 2 or 3 low groans and

starts. My God it starts. And unlike
my family in the house, the job I'm

headed towards, the poems in my briefcase,
the dreams I had last night, there is

no question about what makes sense.
White exhaust billowing from the tail pipe,

Heater blowing, this car is going to
move me, it's going to take me places.

-Stuart Kestenbaum

Yesterday a baby was born...

and so now we have our first whooper chick, and today I took my first turn as mother crane. This means wearing a sack with one sleeve made of white jersey and one sleeve edged with black (my wing) and elastic at the bottom, which hits below my knees, and a white hood over my head with a camo screen in front of my face (it's like wearing blinders on the sides and the top, or so I imagine, since I don't usually wear blinders). It means kneeling in sand below a heat lamp that heats the run to approximate ly 95 degrees, Fahrenheit, while wearing the aforementioned sack. It means doing all this in silence with a puppet on one hand that picks up tiny pellets of food and offers them, repeatedly, to a small bird.

What echoes through my head during this whole process is that I don't want to mess this up. This is the first chick of the year (currently nameless--the name theme this year is cheese, and a list of possibilities is being compiled, and then there will be voting, and THEN there will be a name), and it has been entrusted to us, and somehow by wearing these ridiculous sacks and not talking to it and getting it to drink water from a long-handled red spoon we might teach this tiny bird to be a crane (if no one steps on it--which has happened). What? I still don't believe this actually works. I'm learning how to be a crane at the same time the chick is, though hopefully at a faster rate. Will either of us turn into functioning adults? I'll keep you posted.

Flow

My osteopath congratulates me
on bones that could last 300 years.
So count on chard among the ash,
son, daughter, that you sift into
Scott Springs that feeds
Scott Creek that
swells Rocky Run.

Along the way I startle a trout
nourish a patch of emerald cress
before I spill into
warrior river Tomahawk to
float with the big Wisconsin
a molecule of the Mississippi
an atom flung into the
blue Gulf of Mexico to be
inhaled by the burning sun.

-Margot Peters

I picked this poem up at Necedah NWR the other day--it was on a bookmark in the visitors' center. It seems especially appropriate because today I went kayaking for a long time in the sun, and saw herons and swallows and a kingfisher and a snapping turtle sunning on a log. What is it about water?

Otherwise, not too much happening (it was my day off, remember?). I went to the farmers' market in Baraboo and now I'm thinking about joining a CSA so I don't need to buy all my produce at Walmart.