Down the Drain?

I woke up this morning to a mostly empty nest:

There's still a couple of eggs in the nest which could be either late bloomers or duds. When I looked down the street I saw the mother marching down the sidewalk with a bunch of little fuzzballs in pursuit. I did not get a picture of that but did take my camera along when we left the house to go to work. We circled around the block and discoverd the mother wandering around in the street. When I got out of the car with my camera she started quacking at me and tried to lead me away from some tall grass.

Even the drake showed up and got in on the act:

It turned out that it wasn't the tall grass that the hen was trying to draw me away from after all. To my shock I could hear the duckling's voices, coming from this storm drain:

That storm drain leads to an outlet into a nearby lake (Maybe a 30-50 yard run). To my thinking that hen is either a genius or a fool. Whatever happens to those ducklings, I'm pretty sure that a predator won't get them. The thing is that there's no way that the ducklings can get out the way that they went in, and I'm not so sure that the hen can get to them, either. Regardless of whether this is a brilliant environmental adaptation or yet another mallard mishap that I have been in some way involved in, what I am certain of is that this is not how God intended for ducks to come into the world.

Anybody out there ever hear of ducks using a storm drain like this to raise their young, or are these guys pretty much screwed?

Out & About

The Mallard was AWOL for a while last night:

It turns out she was just playing in traffic:

So I went along the side of the house to look at my flowers:

While I was gone the mallard came back:

Here is another video
(Listen for her huffing and puffing toward the end):

Close Encounters

That Mallard is still nesting in our planter. I've been afraid to mow our lawn lest I should upset her or somehow usurp nature's balance with an internal combustion engine. Our house was starting to look like one of those garbage houses that you hear about on the news, where the water has been shut off for the past 6 months and the people inside have been pooping into garbage bags.

I couldn't stand it yesterday so I finally mowed the lawn. Much to my amazement the girl was as cool as a cucumber and allowed me to do my thing. I got about my business as fast as I could and now we are no longer an aesthetic blight on suburbia. Except of course that we still cannot plant anything in our planter, because there's a duck already planted there. Squatters, I tell ya!

Here are some pictures I took this morning.
I'm not bashful anymore.
I just opened the front door and leaned out and took these.

I shot a video too:

Ice Follies

I got to spend a few hours out on the ice this past sunday. It's been a couple of years since I ice fished at all, and the even that time it was in one of those grand hilton suites out on Milacs. This time it was just me and the elements - No shelter, just an old-school outing, like the old days. Daytime high was only 8 degrees, jack. This wasn't some balmy March day jigging for perch. In a previous life I used to get out 8 - 12 times a winter. It's not like that anymore. Comes with the turf when you have kids.

I picked a lake that I used to go to all the time, for three reasons:

1. Familiarity. I would know where to set up without having to move around (the terms of my work-release made time a constraining factor)
2. Good reports. This could be my only trip of the winter so I did my homework. I shot the breeze at a couple of bait shops during the week prior to the outing. I actually bought some stuff while I visited, so the information exchange was friendly and turned out to be quite honest. Never underestimate the value of greasing the palms of your informants.
   
3. The space-time continuum. Seriously. A signifigant deal of my thoughts (Or maybe a deal of my signifigant thoughts) in life made their maiden voyages through my skull during the times I spent sitting on a pail out on that lake. If I am truly going to recommit to my old fishing habit it only seemed logical to me to start up back where I left it off. Back to the well, to drink once more.

Any way.

The journey which used to take 1+ hours from my NE Minneapolis crack house now only takes about 45 minutes from my posh north suburban junior Mcmansion. Yeah, life's been good to me, as the song goes. That 45 minutes does not include the time to stop and pick up a couple of scoops of crappie minnows and a salted nut roll -- a true ice fishing necessity (The salted nut roll, not the minnows).

Out on the ice the first thing that I noticed was that there are a lot more people ice fishing these days. I couldn't get in to my old sweet spot where I would have been sitting in 20' of water (Unless I wanted to stand on one foot between a couple of tip-ups) so I was forced further out on the drop-off, in about 25 feet of water.

People may tell you that angling is an art form or a skill, either of which can be augmented by the inclusion of technology. To some extent that may be true but I submit to anyone who has stumbled across this blog that angling is nothing less than a priviledge. Think about it. There is a connection to nature that no form of food gathering or hunting can match. Even shooting fowl or beasts of the woods fails to approach the relationship that a man must establish with his foray if he hopes to eat. Yes, angling is a gift straight from God, and the overuse of technology difuses the signifigance of this gift.

Nobody fishes outside anymore. Everybody's got shacks. Cardboard shacks. Plywood shacks. Tin shacks. Robo-shacks that transform into trailers and who knows what else, possibly Jappanese arch-villans for all I know. A few old-timers here and there were in fold-up portables, which are what I grew up using. And then there were all those in-fisherman types with their Fish traps and portable sonars and underwater cameras, all pulled behind a snomobile or ATV.

Feh. Damned kids.

I'm probably just bitter because I had to clear the slush out of my holes about every two minutes, and slip bobbering was a joke. Even the rod & reel combo I brought out was useless, as it was so cold that I could barely get the crank to go around on the reel. It was outdoor bare hand-over-bare hand fishing, baby, a la jigsticks. Told you I was old-school. Did I mention that I was a phi beta kappa jig-sticker? Well I learned it from the best.

All told I spent maybe three hours out on the ice, including startup and takedown time, and within that period I iced six black crappies, four of which I kept. They made for a tasty after dinner snack which nourished my soul more than I can express. Fried crappie is like manna from my childhood.

Autumn Lunchtime Walk

My longing to escape the ruckus of mankind has brought me closer to it today as I visited a park near my workplace over the lunch hour. It is a semi-wooded setting with a pond, teeming with ducks and squirrels. It is surrounded on three sides by residential homes and bordered by a major freeway exchange. So this place where I would go to ponder on the beauty of God's creation is blanketed by the neverending deluge of a million roaring tires. Egads! The earth itself throbs when the big trucks jackbreak. Even the air, which should be filled with the earthy smell of decomposing leaves, carries the faint aroma of a nearby fast food resteraunt.

Yet here still beauty survives. Corralled by asphault walking trails and concrete retaining walls, nature waits patiently for mankind to kill itself off, so that it may start anew.

How Semi-Sweet it was

A notebook jotting from last saturday, written while sitting on a fallen tree somewhere in the middle of the St. Croix state Forest:

Tolkien was not mad when he wrote about trees conversing with one another. Anyone who has spent time in the forest (and has cared to observe) knows that this is an authentic and completely natural occurence.

In the summer they give themselves raucous standing ovations with their emerald gloves, as they sway like drunkards in the warm, narcotic breeze.

In autumn they drop their leaves, each one like a neighborhood watch flyer, creating a communal burglar alarm for the use of all forest residents.

In winter they speak very little, mostly just groans as they rub against each other for warmth.

But in spring they will crack open their buds and don their gloves once more, with all the enthusiasm of a tent-revival crowd about to be born yet again.

I have no idea why, but chocolate always tastes better in the woods.

Get out of town

155 years ago today Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal:

"The poet must keep himself unstained and aloof. Let him perambulate the bounds of Imagination's provinces, the realm of faery, and not the insignificant boundaries of towns. The excursions of the imagination are so boundless, the limits of the town so petty."

Years ago in some journal I myself observed that some of the best places in the world that you can go to you can only reach via gravel roads. I would add that greater still are those places yet beyond, that can only be reached on foot.

So it is with journeys of the imagination. The truly remarkable destinations can only be reached by undertaking the journey on your own two feet, "Hoofing it" as I have conditioned my son to refer to it. Mental prostheses such as TV, Movies and Video Games cheapen the value of the excursion and convert the remarkable to mundane as the landscape is paved over for these vehicles of the imagination. The landmarks become familar and are blown past thoughtlessly.

There is a lake that I drive past every morning on my way to work. I would not notice it all except that I sit at a red light across the street from it every morning. That same view of the lake every single day has become like the face of a friend to me, one that reflects the mood of the day's weather. Some days the lake gives me nothing but a blank stare, with overcast grey eyes. Other days a Davinci-like smirk, as though the sunfish are swimming in the shallows and their dorsal fins are tickling her cheekbones.

Today is sunny and brisk, the changing of the leaves showing up just in the tops of the trees, like the inevitable grey that appears in the hair. All of this was reflected in the face of the lake, which stares at me every morning from across the street like a lunatic, unable to recollect that we passed each other by in this same fashion yesterday and the day before that.

I quietly post this from behind my monitor at lunchtime and do not discuss it with my colleagues. They would not understand. As the landscape of the imagination is paved over and only universally-recognized landmarks are allowed to remain, the odd little nooks and crannies are shunned by the herd.

An imaginary relationship with a lake is nothing to brag about around the water cooler, unless you would prefer to be left alone. And even though I blend into the crowd, I still harbor my imagination and my private thoughts like contraband. Because after all, even a secret relationship with a lake is better than no relationship at all.

Such is the case with all forbidden loves of the mind; they come streaming through the mire of every day life in technicolor, mottling the forest floor of your thoughts like a rays of sunlight. So delicate that even the slightest cloud in the sky can iterdict them and leave you in the gloom, waiting impatiently for that next sunbeam to break through so that you may bolt down the trail in pursuit.