Birds and Books

Alright, a dual purpose blog post :)

Part One: Birds

The 4 owl day I was alluding to in the last post didn't happen...it was actually a zero owl day :( But, on the bright side, it was a Red-shouldered hawk day! :)

For that trip, I headed over to Shiawassee for some birding with Blobbybirdman and our friend Bruce. Due to time constraints and Blobby's inability to follow the directions on his Garmin :) we didn't make it to the second destination of the day which is where we'd hoped to see long and short eared owls. Not only were we able to see a Red-shouldered hawk (a lifer for both Blobby and myself), but I also saw my first Red-winged blackbird of the season. I guess this was 3 weeks ago and by now they are everywhere, but it was exciting at the time :) We also saw a massive group of white-tailed deer - at one point I counted 50 together in a field, but as we drove on and light was fading, there were bunches more. I couldn't even fathom a guess as to how many there were...

In other birding highlights this spring, I took my first trip to Maple River SGA - about 30 min north of Lansing - where I saw many lifers: N. Shoveler, Am. Widgeon, Blue-winged Teal, N. Shrike and Eastern Meadowlark, just to name a few :) And finally, just this past weekend, I got a great look at a Greater Scaup (male and female), Rusty Blackbirds and Brown-headed Cowbirds, all lifers! There are many Lesser Scaup hanging out on my lake and Bruce tried hard the previous week to find one that looked like a Greater, but couldn't find any. He gave me a call Friday night and said he had some in close that he'd been watching and thought they were Greaters. I headed over to where he was and once I took a look into the scope and watched for a bit, the male stretched out his wings and I got a good look at the white on both the secondaries and primaries - a sign it really was a Greater Scaup :)

Part 2: Books!

As a part of my NYR I wanted to read 1 fun book per month this year. I did a good job in Jan and Feb keeping up, but I'm lagging behind a bit this month. I've got about 160 pages left to go in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. It's an absolutely amazing book thus far. I had heard about the book for several years, and knowing it was a part of Oprah's Book Club actually made me not want to read it. However, I got the book for Christmas, so I decided to give it a go. Despite my thoughts that it was going to be a preachy, feely, lets talk about feelings (let's face it, Oprah-y book), it has completely surpassed all of those expectations and is really the most well written book I've ever read.

The basic plot includes the Price family moving from southern Georgia to the Congo in order for Nathan Price, father and preacher, to spread the word of the Lord. The book is eloquently written in a manner no other author I've read has replicated. The Price family has 4 daughters and each chapter (thus far) is narrated by one of the four girls or by the mother. Kingsolver is impressively able to give each girl her own 'voice' that is both unique to that character, and gives different points of view on their experiences in the Congo. I cannot stress how incredible Kingsolver is at differing the writing styles and personalities of the girls. Several times, I have stopped reading in the middle of a chapter, only to pick it up later and be delightfully surprised that I can tell exactly who is narrating the particular chapter. With that said, I've got some work to do to get through the rest of the book by Wednesday night :)

PS - I started writing this blog post on 3.19 and came back to it today 3.29 to finish. I'm not sure why the post is dated the earlier date and it seems there is no way for me to change it?