We don’t get to Hawkfest down at Lake Erie Metropark every year. I think I’ve written before about how much I love to roam the fringes of wilderness along the edges of this large urban park with its tennis courts and wave pool and large expanses of carefully groomed lawn. To me, it is especially beautiful early in the morning as the sun is rising. The light is indescribable. Somehow it feels almost tropical to me and yes, that is a really weird thing to say since this place is downriver from Detroit, fer kee-reist, and I have been there when it was snowing to beat the band with the wind blowing such a gale that I had to wear my snowpants and balaclava.

Hawkfest falls in mid-September and often coincides with the annual closing the cabin ritual. This year we have postponed closing the cabin just a bit and, since we were going to be here on the Planet Ann Arbor anyway, we jumped at the chance to head down to Hawkfest. I think I have said before that I am not anything resembling a serious birder. I actively watch birds and other wildlife in a random way. If I have seen a bird before, I can often identify it again, like when I recognized a killdeer today. There are killdeer along the ponds outside my work. It’s a good thing nobody was counting on me to notice the Mississippi Kite that was not in its regular migratory path because I hadn’t even heard of one of those before.

We did more or less our usual pattern of hiking down there. We participated in the Hawkfest pancake breakfast and attended the Howell Nature Center program on raptors, where we met a falcon, two hawks, a turkey vulture, and a snowy owl. All of the rescued birds that we met could not be released into the wild for one reason or another. I really enjoyed the program this year. The Howell folks are always good but I particularly liked today’s presenter.

I took a lot of photooooos and posted 22. I didn’t take bird photos although there is one groundhog. We saw a few of those tunneling around under the “rocks” down by the shore, rocks that I am sure were probably not there even 25 years ago. Y’all, I am trying something different with the photos this time. Instead of creating 22 little html files, I have put my photos on my Flickr account. I hope this works for people. If you don’t usually look at my stupid slide shows, you don’t care and that is A-OK. If you do, lemme know if this Flickr thing works for you. Or not. Er, please try…

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.