Engage silent drive!

I love our canoe. There aren't too many kinds of boats in which you can sneak up on a heron, but we're lucky enough to have one of the best. We have two travel modes. There's Full Steam Ahead, in which my mate-4-life, sitting in the back, applies full power to a kayak paddle (blade on each end), so he can easily alternate strokes. I sit in the front seat and pretend my paddling helps, while my expensive, can't-live-without-it digital camera sits wrapped in a towel in my LAP, for heaven's sake! We make a bit of splashy noise in this mode, but I have never yet dropped the camera.

But we have the most fun when we travel in Silent Mode, paddling very slowly through the shallows, looking for birds, snakes, turtles, flowers -- anything interesting. We usually manage to see something new, or learn something, or at least come up with a new question.

This past weekend we went exploring in a flooded area of Lake Monroe, gliding through "islands" of swamped trees. We watched herons and tracked songbirds through the trees at the edge of the water.

We spent a long time following songbirds. One bird that I didn't recognize was heavily streaked with brown and white, with an orangey throat. It turned out to be a female red-wing blackbird--a very common bird after all. But at least next time I see it, I'll know it immediately.

We saw a couple of other unfamiliar birds. One tiny black and white bird was very elusive. I have several pictures of big green leaves, with a beak or a tail sticking out one side or the other.

We saw prothonotary warblers for the first time ever. [This is a correction--I had earlier identified this bird as a pine warbler, but pine warblers have white wing bars.] These energetic little yellow birds were difficult to keep up with, but fun to watch as they flitted from branch to branch. The bird in this photo has caught a caterpiller. (I wish they'd eat something that wasn't supposed to turn into a butterfly!)


Photographing birds and nature is an obsession for me. I'm not sure why, but I just have to take pictures. I'm not a great photographer--in fact, it's very frustrating for me. I have terrible eyesight and find it difficult to focus my camera. I lack patience with manuals and can't figure out my own light meter...in fact, taking pictures is so frustrating that next weekend, I'm going to do as much of it as I can. Go figure.

Water Lines

Water, water, water. It's clear to everyone by now that Indiana, though hit hard by flooding in some areas, got off easy, and it's hard to imagine the situation in Iowa.

We've been canoeing around Lake Monroe whenever we get a sunny weekend. The lake is at 548.73 feet this week, with a level of 538 feet being normal. Last weekend, when these pictures were taken, the level was 550.79 feet. (As my mate4life has carefully explained to me, the lake levels refer to feet above sea level and not the depth of the lake -- thank goodness!)

The businesses around the lake have suffered, as several weeks of boat rentals, cabin rentals, camping and so on were lost to the flooding. You'd have a hard time cooking anything on the grill in the photo! But a few weeks ago, we canoed right over top of it and couldn't even tell it was there.

The high water has left a brown strip of dead foliage all around the lake. Herons can be seen hanging around in areas that would normally be woods, while the sand bars they usually occupy are no longer in shallow water. I don't know if the fishing for them is better or worse.


My garden, too, would like to see a little more sun. The bee balm has mildew on its leaves and some of the shorter rudbeckia flowers look beaten up. The forecast calls for sun tomorrow. Shabbat Shalom!

High water

The water's been very high at Lake Monroe, near Bloomington, for the past few weeks. On the first of June, we took our canoe out for a little exploring. It was really strange, paddling around through the trees, where normally we would be walking. At one point the road leading down to a launch site was under water, and as we paddled across it we could see the yellow no-passing line beneath us. Recent heavy rains have made the water even higher. Last weekend, after the storms had stopped, we went back to explore more of the lake.

We saw: several turtles basking on logs, 2 small snakes, 1 eastern box turtle, 2 lizards, a red fox squirrel, a chipmunk, lots of yellow swallowtail butterflies, 2 baltimore orioles, 1 yellow warbler, a great blue heron, 2 families of Canada geese and their goslings, and 1 unlucky catfish. The catfish is a long story--we freed him from a fishing line tied to a tree, and then, realizing that he had been hooked on purpose and not by accident, fled the area for fear of running into the person who had set the line!

Fishing is not a kind sport--and sometimes it is not friendly to other wildlife, either. We untangled quite a bit of fishing line from trees, as it endangers the birds who get caught in it, and collected lead sinkers left behind. We also pulled plastic bobbers out of the trees; these I'm stringing together as a kind of trophy.

Southern Indiana has been hit hard by recent storms and flooding. Homes have been damaged, even destroyed. The full extent of the damage is just now being assessed. We haven't heard much yet about the impact on wildlife; I suppose that will become evident over a longer time.