Putting Names to Voices

It is morning: after the first stir, before the second alarm. The window is open. I have been reading, but now I lie still, wondering at the chorus of voices from those whose work begins much earlier than mine.

I sort out the many separate songs and wait for the names to come, but there are few. The clay-coloured sparrow, of course: an un-birdlike buzz, so much less musical than the rest, and yet I cherish that voice as one that I can always name. There are several lovely melodies, captivating while I listen, but indescribable and even beyond recollection just a few moments later. One keeps ending with a suspiciously familiar chirp, and I wrestle with the startling idea that it might be the voice of a plain old house sparrow. There is a yellow warbler - "sweet, sweet, sweet, please some more sweet" - that one I know. Up front and insistent, over and over, there is an emphatic little song that rises repeatedly to a higher and louder tone. I want to picture the bird stamping his tiny foot as he sings, but that would make him tippy, so instead I imagine him beating his wings against his body in time with his tirade. There comes a snatch of familiar tones - is that a robin? Out beyond it all, when I listen for it, I hear the beloved tune of a meadowlark, the song that everyone knows.

Why that song? Why, with so many songs rippling by unnamed, why do we know that one?

I suppose it returns to us early in the spring, before the chorus becomes overwhelming. And it rings out to us often from a fence post or a power pole, out in the wide fields where the songs are fewer.

I hope someone can tell me who that emphatic little singer might be. If I could learn just one more name today...

The Turkeys

March 25th 2007, right here in Arcola. Congrats to Madcap Mum for solving the puzzle on the first guess.



Is there something about that yard across the street, where you can see the wild turkeys just rounding the corner of the hedge? Somewhere I have a picture of the wing-tip marks in the snow where a ring-necked pheasant jumped out of that same hedge last fall. This spring I was visiting over there, and as I walked back, I noticed movement on a spruce branch just above the walk. There was a woodpecker, and to my delight, she continued to peck at the bark just six feet or so away, giving me a great chance to look for all the marks that distinguish between downy and hairy woodpeckers. I couldn't figure her out at all. The field guide confirmed that she was neither; instead she was a black-backed woodpecker - the first one I had ever seen. True to the typical behaviour of her species, she was stripping bark off the smaller branches of a conifer.

I wonder if the remarkable bird sightings in that yard have something to do with the density and age of the trees there. There is a nearly complete border of trees and hedge, plus more trees inside. I hadn't noticed how aged those trees were until I happened upon an old aerial photo in the Arcola-Kisbey history book, showing the yard thickly treed back in 1954, while the yard that we now own was still essentially bald.

It's opening day...

...of the Great Backyard Bird Count! (Previous...)

I've been searching for images of Saskatchewan birds, and found some fine collections of bird photographs from our vicinity. The most striking is a blog by Saskatoon-based Nick Saunders. You may have to wade a bit if you search for a specific bird, but browsing is a delight.

Here are some others:

Saskatchewan:
Saskatchewan Ecosystem Image Information System
Gallery: Birds of Saskatchewan by Rick Carlson

Manitoba:
Manitoba Naturalists Society - Miscellaneous Images
Christian Artuso's Wildlife Photography
The Birds of Manitoba Online

North Dakota: from the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center:
Songbirds of North Dakota
Sparrows of North Dakota
Marshbirds and Shorebirds of North Dakota
Hawks, Eagles and Falcons of North Dakota
The Owls of North Dakota

Montana:
Birds - Montana Animal Field Guide

South Dakota:
South Dakota Birds and Birding
Doug Backlund Photography

How Many Rock Pigeons on the Who-oops Saloon?

Coming soon: the Great Backyard Bird Count!

I've been idly wondering about taking part in a bird count for years, but only idly. I got almost serious about it when my work assignments had me learning bird calls and identifying the birds in an area by sound (as part of pre-development site assessments). The famous "Breeding Bird Survey," or BBS, is done by sound, and I dreamed that I might be getting good enough to volunteer, but never got up the nerve to put my skills to the test.

A Christmas Bird Count would be a much easier place to start, but somehow Christmas always seemed too busy already.

Now thanks to Clare, I've just learned about the perfect beginner bird count. It takes place February 16th to 19th, and you can do your count anywhere, for as little as 15 minutes, as long as it falls within those four days. All you do is count the maximum number of birds of each species that you see while you watch in one location. You report your counts online, and there are instructions and tips to get you started. If you really get into it, you don't have to stop on the 19th after all; you can report observations to eBird all year long. (Click here for eBird Canada.)

Don't know many birds? Well, in February in Saskatchewan, you don't need to know many! I got browsing through the eBird data and came up with a listing of 27 bird species that have been reported for Saskatchewan, in the Prairie Pothole Region, within the month of February. (Choose "All birds at a location," and then "Within Bird Conservation Regions that I choose in this state or province," then make your selections. Once you get a list, click on a month title to limit the list to species seen in that month.) Many of those species you might already know, and the rest you can check in a bird guide. (There are many well-known guides to North American birds, but Saskatchewan Birds is an excellent guide that won't drown you in information about birds never seen north of Texas.) For those of you in warmer climes, all I can say is "good luck"!

If you'd rather click than walk to a bookshelf or a bookstore, try the Cornell Online Bird Guide.

Uh-oh. I feel an idea coming on. Maybe I could volunteer to do a presentation at the school, to let kids know about this Great Backyard Bird Count and get them ready to take part. Most of the older kids will be off on a ski trip on the 16th, and school is closed for the week of the 19th, so a school outing to do the actual counts is probably out. But if they could go home and get their parents interested, so much the better.

Streetwalking Season

It was a surreal scene on Main Street at dusk, with the headlights of a riding snowblower illuminating the drifting snow where the sidewalk was partially cleared, and more headlights picking out the bank of a large snow ridge piled down the center of the street.

I kept out of the way of the snowblower and scurried through the deep snow by the corner, back onto the plowed surface of the side street that leads me home. Off Main Street, the sidewalks are all buried about six inches deep, except where the grader piled the windrow over them, or that place by the school where somebody pushed a great heap about four feet high. I can see giving up on the sidewalks in late January, but November?

The strangest sight of this evening, though, was the large V of noisy geese, racing south above it all.

Warblers Return

A couple of days ago, walking from the garden toward the house in that peculiar dazed state as my back slowly straightened out and my awareness slowly broadened from task to surroundings, I halted and stared after an unmistakable pattern of black and orange. A redstart had just flitted across my yard.

I never would have expected to see one here in town. North in the hills, certainly, but here? There are plenty of hedgerows, but no big patches of bush. My guess is that he was just taking a little side tour while passing through.

Later, back at the digging, I listened to the background birdsong and noticed how it had changed since I first started my digging project. Meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds, and robins have been joined by numerous goldfinches with their bright rising whistles and the exuberant-sounding "dip-dip-dip" of their flight song. I heard a sharp "Che-BEK! Che-BEK!" and thought, "Ah, a least flycatcher." But I also heard the clear whistled melody of a white-throated sparrow and thought about how the chickadees had fooled me way back in March. I don't know if there was an influx of chickadees, or if they switched from "dee-dee-dee" to their whistled song, or if I just suddenly started listening, but I thought I was hearing white-throated sparrows. This week I'm hearing the real thing and feeling a bit silly.

The reminder of my folly will soon pass, as the sparrows move on toward the edge of the boreal forest.

I continued to listen, and slowly some of the chorus resolved into two separate familiar songs: common yellowthroat and yellow warbler. That would make sense, in our small-town mosaic of lawns and trees and hedges. Still, mistrustful of my ear, I listened very intently, trying to bring to mind a clear recollection of the songs I knew, and at the same time to hear openly without the distortion of expectations.

One voice was very close. In fact, it came from the branches of the Manitoba maple directly behind me. What were the chances I could get a glimpse? Well, it couldn't hurt to try. I set down the shovel and walked toward the tree, not troubling too much about moving slowly or quietly or circuitously. The song stopped, but I saw a flicker of movement. A few more steps, and a little more movement among the leaves above, and there it was. Its striking black mask and bright yellow throat were familiar from fieldguide pictures, but as far as I can recall, I had never actually seen one before; I knew it only by its voice. And I knew it correctly, as the common yellowthroat.

Reassured, I went back to my shovel.

Ten Beautiful Birds

Nobody tagged me, but I'm grabbing this meme as it goes by.

I won't say "most beautiful," because I'm sure I will think of others right after I hit the publish button. These are simply the beautiful birds from my own area that have come to mind, or crossed my vision, in recent days.

1. Black terns, dipping and skimming over a dugout.
   
2. American redstart. I will never forget the pair that raised their young in the livingroom window when I was young. I mean literally, in the window. We lived in a house trailer with windows consisting of shingled strips of glass that could be rotated open as louvers for ventilation. I guess the window louvers got left partly open, and the birds came in. They soon had a great tangle of twigs between the louvers and the screen. Who would want to stop them?
3. Western grebe.
4. Northern pintail.
5. American avocet.
   
6. For their song: Sprague's pipits, plural. That song came creeping into my consciousness one June day in the wide lonely beauty of the Great Sandhills, as I catalogued the flora of a proposed gas well site and access. As I became aware of it, I was struck by its seeming impossibility: an endlessly descending waterfall of trilling sound, never reaching a bottom, never running out of top. I've heard Sprague's pipits a few times in other places (including just down the road), but never in the numbers it takes for that kind of sound.
7. And also for the song, this song familiar from beyond the bounds of conscious memory, just a part of the atmosphere of the forested north slope of the farm where I grew up: the veery.
8. For their acrobatics: Eastern kingbirds.
9. For gentle fearlessness: cliff swallows. I love to bike down to the bridge on the 604 and be wrapped up in a swirling twittering cloud of graceful birds.
   
10. And finally, for sheer cheeky charm: the black-capped chickadee.

Of music festival and bird reports

Just back from the music festival (deep sigh of relief here). On the drive back, Mom saw a bluebird. We saw a crow too, and a goose standing on the ice covering a small slough, with neck stretched high as if to say "I own this pond." Mom thought he was saying, "Funny - it was here last year..." She saw a duck the other day, too.

The kids did well with their solos, although James was so displeased at getting a lower mark than his sister, he wants to pick out next year's solo TODAY. I told him that sounds good - it might give me enough time to learn to play the accompaniment.

I was musing a while ago about my deadline-treadmill life, and wondering how to change it. It occurred to me that I could approach things like music differently. Instead of the pattern I learned in school, where you enter a music festival class and then prepare the piece to play, I could play music I like, practise it until I like the sound of it, and then find a place to play it. If that place happens to be a music festival, or the church, so much the better. Instead of the commitment spurring the practise, the practise would lead to the commitment.

Now if I could just work my way out from under some of my existing commitments, I could begin to practise something new.

Suddenly Birds

Last week we took the long way from Carlyle, on the back roads, just to see if the water was running in the creek. There were horned larks everywhere, and still some lingering snow buntings. The horned larks return ahead of the spring, and I wondered how long they've been back.

Last evening Ruth and I were walking along Souris Avenue, east towards the edge of town. Suddenly I noticed the sounds of birds. Sparrows we have all year round, but these were new sounds - nothing definitely identifiable, at least to my little-trained and winter-rusty ears. Goldfinches? I always thought of those yellow-bright cheery birds as summer creatures only, but since I've been blogging, I've learned that they are not very far away in winter, and usually not bright yellow, either, so perhaps they are around here much more than I realized.

And just now, even from here inside the house, I heard a white-throated sparrow.

Now I'm second-guessing - could it have been a chickadee?

Why am I so reluctant to believe that spring is here?

Birds yesterday

While I think of it - as I walked home yesterday, my mind said, "That sound is new - merlins!"

Then my other mind retorted, "How do you know it's merlins?"

A small hawk came speeding up the strip of sky between the street trees, and I thought, "See? It is a merlin!"

Then my other mind retorted, "How do you know that's a merlin?"

Another one perched in the top of a spruce across the street and let me take a good look. I checked out some pictures just now - definitely a merlin. How did I know? Beats me.

There was an owl calling last evening, too. Great horned, I think.

This evening, not even a sparrow.

Know the cost

We saw large flocks of geese feeding in a field some weeks ago, but I hadn't noticed any since then. Yesterday they were flying over in large "V"s, high up, heading south. That's rather late, isn't it? The fall has been very warm over all.

Phyllis and I had found ourselves walking the same way for a while, and we stopped to look up and listen to their calls. She said, "Can you imagine wanting to shoot one of those?" I replied that I had considered hunting geese, and she gave me a poke and said, "Oh, don't you even think about it." I mentioned that I have hunted deer, but we were coming to the parting of our ways, so the conversation ended there.

With hunting seasons a popular topic on various blogs, and discussions about tighter gun control in the news, I thought I'd post a poem that sums up my feelings on the subject. I sometimes hear this as a sort of bluesy song lyric, taking some liberties with the tune from one verse to the next, but it's not a comfortable genre for me so I haven't worked on it much.

I’ve Got a Rifle
©2003 Laura Herman

You call me a killer.
You call me a killer.

Before you criticize
my way of life,
you'd better check your hands.
You might be holding a knife.

They say the pen is mightier,
mightier than the sword.
Well, I've got a rifle.
You've got a credit card.

On foot in the bush,
knowing there's hard work ahead,
I may bring down a deer
to keep my family fed.

And you walk in to your
favorite restaurant,
look down that menu,
and pick out whatever you want.

They list all the items with
mouth-watering names,
but you don't know where that food
was grown, or how it came.

Tell me how many deer
die in front of semi trucks.
Tell me how many grainfields
no longer have marshes for ducks.

As you break that bread, and
sip that sweet wine,
tell me how far it travelled
from the field and the vine.

And for every calorie in your
vegetarian meal,
tell me how many calories
burned up in fossil fuel.

You don't know much about my life.
You know less about yours.
Thanks for listening, and sorry
if you're not that hungry anymore.

Take a look at that plastic in your hands.
Look at it hard.
Yes, I've got a rifle.
You've got a credit card.

I don't actually have a rifle, by the way, in case you're thinking of reporting me. I took firearm safety when I was a teenager. After we went to the shooting range, one of the parents told my mom, "If you're as good a shot as she is, she'll never have a chance at a boyfriend. You'll just sit up on that hill and pick them off!" But life was very hectic during that year when I could have got my possession license just by applying, and ever since then, I just haven't got around to taking the test. One of these years...

Back on the mighty Moose

We had the canoe on the creek again today. This time it was Ruth and me, while Garth took James swimming at the Carlyle Pool. They dropped us off at the concrete crossing two miles west of Highway 9, and I told Garth we'd meet him at the highway, even if we had to walk.

Well, walk we did, quite a bit. In the creek. Ruth loved it. It wasn't what I'd had in mind, and I couldn't get my jeans rolled high enough, but it got us over the gravel bars and the rock ridges. It also kept me looking at my footing, so I saw crayfish that I'd never have noticed otherwise. There were fish, too, about six or seven inches long. The one I saw fairly close up looked like a pike.

There weren't as many ducks as we saw last time (northeast of Forget), and most of the adults were flying okay. It was fun to watch Ruth's reaction when a bunch of ducklings suddenly burst out of the grass on the bank where we had just passed, and went flapping and splashing and quacking away behind us.

Ruth spotted the painted turtle. It was sunning on something (Ruth says it was a piece of driftwood; I was too busy looking at the turtle), and we passed just a couple of feet from it. Ruth wanted to back up and look closer, but before she could get me organized to do that, it slipped off and swam. Wow! Turtles are fast! I'd never thought of a turtle as streamlined, but watching that little discus-shaped body skimming off into the weeds, I got a new perspective.

A great blue heron let us drift up quite close before launching off. Swallows harassed a female northern harrier. A pair of blue-winged teal kept ahead of us nicely, and finally flew back upstream, passing us in the creek channel, when Garth and James came hiking up towards us from the highway.

The only plant that Ruth asked about was the sneezeweed blooming on the banks. She commented later about the rosehips covering a bush that hung over the bank. That and the rose patch she walked through (in bare feet) while lining the canoe through some shallows. I didn't take much notice of the plants on this trip, because I was too busy studying the channel ahead and steering. In general though, it was a very different shoreline from the stretch northeast of Forget. There were no cattails and very few reeds. As I recall, the bank vegetation was mostly grass. Of course, the landscape was very different too, with the creek flowing through a definite valley instead of a broad plain.

In addition to all the wildlife, we enjoyed the curious horses. A pair met us just around one of the first bends, and watched with friendly intensity as we passed. Towards the end of our journey, I could see some majestic black horses ahead. There were four blacks and a grey, it turned out, and like the first pair, they stood close on the bank as we approached. Then a meander of the channel turned us straight toward them. There must have been some heavy-horse blood in them, judging by the great hoofs they showed us when they turned and galloped up the valley side.

It was almost sunset when we reached the highway, about an hour later than we'd planned. Next time we'll remember to take a snack, and a camera (sorry again!). On the way home we saw two young coyotes go bounding off the road ahead of us. We passed several combines and grain trucks in action, and I wondered what the farmers would be thinking, seeing us driving through the Wordsworth area with a canoe on top. Garth just wished that he was out combining too.

Hummingbird sighting

I heard the hum first, and I was sure I knew that hum, but oddly, it was coming from the treetops. I stopped and stared up at the Manitoba maples behind the garage, and sure enough, among the topmost branches, a hummingbird was darting and hovering, and occasionally perching. I'm not sure I've ever seen one perch. After a moment it came down almost straight at me, fast, with wingbeats slow enough to look like a rapid flutter instead of a blur, and no hum. Then it veered off and hovered and perched, hovered and perched its way through the chokecherry bush-tree. At one point I had quite a clear view, and I noticed creamy-white corners on its tail. Checking the bird book, I decided it must be a female, and in this area, almost certainly a ruby-throated. The last I saw of her, she was heading west through the tops of the next row of Manitoba maples. I wonder what she was getting up there. Sap from the aphid damage?

A day on Moose Mountain Creek

The kids are both at camps, so Garth and I took the day off too, and went canoeing. The land north of Highway 13 between Kisbey and Forget looks very different from between the banks of Moose Mountain Creek. Sorry, no pictures - we were already on the highway before we thought of the camera - but I'll try to give you a sense of what we saw.

We started at the low level crossing (a ford paved with concrete) about a mile and a quarter north of the highway, and paddled upstream so that the return trip would be easier. Going against the current wasn't hard at all, though; we found out later that wind was more of a factor, but fortunately upstream was more or less the same as upwind today.

The first thing we noticed was the ducks, dozens of them, making a great ruckus flapping along on the water ahead of the canoe. Some were ducklings, quite unable to fly, but paddling almost on top of the water at an impressive speed. They hung in small groups (families, I suppose), moving off ahead of us in explosive lunges whenever we got close. We were worried about harassing them, and we found that we could usually get past them by keeping close to one bank and coming up on them fast, so that they rushed off into the cattails by the far bank. Some of the adults did a lot of flapping along on the water too, and we wondered how much of it was faking just to decoy us away from the ducklings. But some seemed to have real difficulty getting airborne, so I suspect there was some moulting going on as well. I checked into the timing of moulting, and found this article (pdf) which indicates that several species could be flightless around late July or early August, depending on whether they are male or female, successful nesters or not, etc. Looks like we chose just about the worst possible time to be on the creek. Sorry, ducks.

A great blue heron made several short flights up the channel ahead of us. One time it perched on a small willow just outside the channel so we saw it silhouetted in profile against the sky. Garth was impressed with its size and the speed it made as it circled back downstream to find some peace behind us.

I was puzzled by a trio of heron-like birds that took off too soon for us to get a good look. I saw them flying at a distance several times, and they flew with heads tucked back like herons, but without the long trailing legs. They were also sort of shorter and heavier looking, with pale plumage, maybe a pale grey?

Some small swimming birds that looked like sandpipers must have been Wilson's phalaropes. At one point a group of black terns circled noisily above us. Only one of the three was in breeding plumage (black underneath, except for the tail), and this one was particularly noisy, flying straight at us several times.

About a mile above our start point, we passed under a transmission line. I'd never taken a good look at one before. The wooden tower was right on the creek bank, stabilized with culverts around the two posts and a mound of fill up around those. It looked a bit like this diagram except that the three phase wires were single wires, and both posts of the tower had a wire up top instead of the single neutral shown. The really amazing thing was the crackling buzz from the wires. According to SaskPower's "Fundamentals of Electricity," those are uninsulated wires carrying voltages several hundred to several thousand times higher than household. Yikes!

When we pulled up on the bank for lunch, climbing just that couple of feet higher gave us a view of the countryside. Pasture in all directions, with no roads visible anywhere, just a couple of fences, some power lines, a com tower, and some clay piles suggesting a dugout. Other than that, grass, willows, distant hills, sky, and some quiet cattle. Garth suggested I look the other way while he walked off a bit, but then immediately he called me to come and look, he'd found a frog. A big one. "What colour?" I asked, and sure enough, it was green: a leopard frog. I hadn't seen one since that bizarre time at Old-Man-On-His-Back some years ago, at the first Botany Blitz, when somebody found a tiny leopard frog high on a near-desert ridge with no water visible in any direction. Anyway, it was pleasing to see one, since I have heard that they have declined sharply in western Canada in recent decades.

Garth was getting bored, but I wanted to see if the creek looked any different once we got into the PFRA pasture (Tecumseh). The trouble was, I didn't know exactly where we were, or where the boundary was, or even whether I would recognize it when we got there. But Garth agreed to press on for a while. I spotted a line of something across the creek ahead - a mostly submerged fence? An old beaver dam? No, once we got up to it, it looked more like a new beaver dam, just sticks with no mud applied yet. The water flowed through it nicely but as for the canoe, we had to go to shore, climb out, and drag it over.

We noticed some of the ducklings diving instead of hiding in the cattails, and when I watched closely, I got to see a couple of them swimming underwater, directly under the boat. Here and there we saw schools of minnows, too, or maybe they were fish fry. The creek is important breeding habitat for fish that come up from the Alameda Reservoir. We saw them this spring at the concrete crossing south of town, struggling to climb the steep side of the concrete against the current, always being driven back. I'm not sure at what time they succeed in getting over that crossing, maybe when the water is higher, or maybe they go through in the culverts when it's lower.

About two miles from our starting point, the creek doubled back sharply so we were going southeast instead of northwest. Then it got quite loopy. We passed a fenceline (grateful that it ended on the banks instead of stretching across), then moments later saw the same fence again, just touching the shore on a bend. I guess we were in Pheasant Rump reserve land at that point. A few more meanders and we found a fence with those big, solid, regularly spaced posts that say "PFRA." Again, it left the channel clear, so we continued happily upstream.

Did the creek look different? Well, yes, but not sharply so, and I'm not sure the change was associated with the change in land tenure and management. The channel was certainly narrower, and the vegetation was different, with a lot more floating bur-reed in the channel, less pondweed, and visible grassy banks instead of mostly cattails and bulrushes bordering the channel. But the change was gradual, and if I had to say where it started, I'd say at that sharp bend where we first got into the meanders. That was well before we reached the PFRA fenceline.

We did notice several places where the bank was completely bare and trampled by cattle. Whether these spots were more common outside the PFRA pasture than in - well, maybe, but I wasn't counting, and we didn't get far into the PFRA. We came to another beaver dam, this time a complete one, with water gushing over a low spot. We went to the quiet side and dragged the canoe over, paddled a bit farther, and there was the steel bridge. If you've crossed the pasture to get to the oil battery in those hills south of the Gap, you've been over that bridge. We couldn't get under it though, because the water got too shallow there, and it was getting on in the afternoon, so we turned back.

Running downstream was faster and easier, but we tested the drift on a sheltered meander and decided it was mostly due to the wind. The ducks were quieter too. Maybe most of them had died of fright when we first passed? I don't think so. I think they learned the drill and just dived to avoid us. We saw some tiny ducklings dive and then come back up just so that their heads were above water, waiting till we were almost upon them before they dived again.

On the way upstream, we had noticed some plants that looked like undersized cattails. Passing them again on the way downstream, I realized that they weren't cattails at all. Checking my books this evening, I decided they must be giant bur-reed. So, some parts of the creek had mostly grassy banks, some had mostly cattails (occasionally with bulrushes), and some had giant bur-reed. Certain birds seemed to keep to certain areas, too. The terns had a particular area (north of the transmission line, I think), and I especially noticed that red-winged blackbirds were more abundant downstream where it was more marshy with lots of bulrushes.

Suddenly we came into muddy water. Cattle must have forded the creek at that spot while we were upstream.

A while later I heard a strange trampling noise, almost ignored it, but then thought it too peculiar and looked back. There was a horse on the bank, staring after us.

Back at the launch point, I saw another leopard frog. Someday I'd like to hear one. They say the sound is like rubbing your thumb on a balloon. It's actually quite easy to learn the few frog calls that you hear in Saskatchewan, and then you can monitor frogs and contribute your observations to FrogWatch.

I also got a close look at some plants I've been noticing from the highway for several years, in the marshy areas near the creek. You might have seen them: they are fairly tall, with umbrellas of tiny white flowers, looking vaguely like dill (a relative). I was hoping they weren't water hemlock, but in fact they were. It's poisonous, especially the roots; apparently a single bulb can kill a cow.

Overall, I estimate we paddled about seven miles (three and a half each way). It took us six hours, including the stop for lunch. I'll be stiff tomorrow.