Monthly Archives: May 2013

Come Gather ‘Round

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Usually it is the oldest crane in the flock that will call the others to join him for late night story telling but occasionally a younger crane will take over and hold the nightly gathering in their place. Some of their stories are as old as their migratory routes and some are yesterday’s news. Many times you will find that there are larger gatherings at the young cranes get-together’s than you will find at the old timers’. To their dismay the old ones find that things meaningful to them don’t have the appeal to grab the young’s attention any more especially after they have been told many, many, times. The old stories get boring the young say (not that one about the old crane that ate so much corn it couldn’t …) while something new and feather-tingling keeps the gathering fresh and exciting.

According to Dr. Beakston our resident birdologist a male Sandhill Crane is known as a ‘him’ while the female is called a ‘her’ in an effort to be able to distinguish between the sexes as they appear to be very similar to the untrained eye. However this is an acquired skill leading to many a misidentification and much hilarity amongst the ranks of younger birds. Tonight it is a young crane calling the flock in for the nightly narrative and his story is absolutely riveting to the younger audience.

His adventure of flying over a hip hop concert and almost being shot out of the sky by  appreciative concert goers exercising their right of self-expression left his listeners nearly speechless. They too secretly and some not so secretly, wished that they could have been almost shot out of the sky over a concert so they would be cool and have stories to tell when it was their turn to hold the meeting.

Afterwards as always there were the usual warnings issued by the older members of the flock about the dangers of concert flyovers such as, “it might be fun now, but wait until someone gets an eye out and then where would you be”.  But of course, during moments of great excitement like this those warnings went largely unheeded. The young are invincible after all. There were many meetings held that night by whomever could drum up an audience and this one at the middle pond at Bosque del Apache was no better or worse than others, a little louder perhaps but a lot more exciting to those reveling in their youth. There would be many an eye peeled for future concerts and the thought of the risk and danger ahead kept this group hopping into the early morning hours.

Joie de Vivre

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Oh those French moose, they know how to live. Here its Monday morning and so many of us get up, wander around, act like a bear with a sore derriere and generally miss out on arguably the best part of the day. When I was younger, back around the time they were still using sticks to wage war, I was one of those who thought that if God had wanted you to get up early you would do it naturally. Now however, that I have ‘geezed out’, I find that I do get up naturally. And what’s more I like it.

This young lady moose is certainly under thirty and you can’t help but see the natural joy she has in greeting the morning by catching those first warming rays of the sun. Which leads me to believe she is French, that and the accent, of course. It’s spring on the Snake river in Wyoming, a carefree time for most and a time to make the most of life that you can. So wake up, get out there, stick your muzzle into the morning sun and live. Life is too short to walk around scratching your hiney, waiting for the coffee to get done.

Cows Behaving Badly

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This story like so many others starts innocently enough. We have a young girl just discovering her budding cow-hood. She’s young, she’s beautiful and like so many other young girls, she just wants to have fun. The herd is spending a lovely June afternoon at Sheep lake in Rocky Mountain National Park, the water is cool, there are snacks to nibble on and best of all she can see herself reflected in the mirror-like surface of the lake.

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Noticing some of the young bulls grazing nearby she manages to delicately display some hoof under the guise of removing some non-existent reeds.

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Since she has the lake to herself at the moment she unwisely decides to cavort in a most unseemly manner in an effort to become the center of attention. She notices that all the nearby bulls are now paying very close attention to her.

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So she coyly begins her dance by striking the water with her front hoof in a provocative display, all sense of decorum has now flown out the window and she gives in to her base desires to be noticed.

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Relinquishing all common sense she gyrates wildly in a pagan display of abandonment and casts off all modesty and proper ladylike demurement.

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Beginning to tire a bit and flush with the excitement of being the star of the afternoon she slows her dance and decides to reap some of the benefits of her endeavors.

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Thinking to rejoin the herd as the new queen of the meadow she approached the others with thoughts of “I feel pretty, I feel pretty, I feel pretty and witty and wise” running through her head.

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Until she meets mom, that is. Things are not going as planned. Statements of “Have you “completely lost your mind” and “What were you thinking” land on deaf ears.

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Seeing that she is not having the desired effect on this wayward child, efforts ratchet up. Harsh words are spoken. Words like “Strumpet, and “Hussy” and even “Trollop” are spoken out loud in an effort to bring this child to her senses.

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But unfortunately it is all to no avail. It’s back to the lake to show off again. She is not going to be treated like a child and be denied her fun in the sun, not today.

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Even more determined to be seen as a young cow of the world she puts on an even greater display of wanton behavior in a vain attempt to recapture that glorious feeling of being the center of attention and the queen of the meadow.

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However the moment is gone and her desperate attempts to recapture that former glory are just that, desperate.

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Now she reaps the bitter fruits of her rebelliousness. Rejected by the herd for her not quite lewd but certainly lascivious display she is shunned and sent to the far outer limits of the meadow to ponder her actions and hopefully learn that decorum is the rule to ladylike behavior and herd acceptance. Growing up can be hard during this time in her life but thankfully she has only been brazen and has not succumbed to dangerous and unlawful activities such as sneaking off and eating locoweed like some of the other young cows have done. So there is hope for her yet. After she realizes that her elders were only interested in her well being and if she is contrite she will be welcomed back into the herd with open arms. The  moral here is not “If you got it Flaunt it” but instead, be careful young cows, your reputation is all you have.”

Shooting the Dawn

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You ever notice how morning comes early almost everywhere. You have to get up pretty darn early to beat the morning. I’ve noticed that this is particularly true when I’m trying for dawn in the Grand Canyon. I wake up to what I think is really early, like middle of the night early, and I’m already late for morning. I think you have to go out there right before dark and just stay there all night to be ready to see morning at it’s proper time. This is dawn in the Grand Canyon, I did it, I got up at the crack of dawn, put on every piece of clothes I brought with me because it is cold, cold, cold on the rim of the canyon in December and went out to shoot the morning light.

It was about 5 AM when I got there and you know what, it was dark out, really dark, there wasn’t even the hint of any morning happening. I hung around and hung around and thought something must be terribly wrong because we weren’t having dawn that morning. Not any. I mean who you gonna call when that happens. That’s right, nobody.  As it turns out all my worrying about making it up in time for dawn was just stupid because dawn doesn’t happen until quarter to nine in the morning in December at the Grand Canyon.

This vantage point was Grandview Point and that’s where and when this picture was taken, December 5, 8:45am. Stay in bed, sleep in, have a cup of tea, drive really slow to the rim and then you get dawn. It’s a really civilized way to have morning. It turns out that every other time I had tried for dawn it had been in the summer time when dawn happens shortly after dusk or so it seems. So lesson learned, ask somebody when dawn is around here as soon as you get there and save yourself a lot of stress. This job is supposed to be fun anyway. By the way this is one of those panorama shots where this picture is made up from 27 single images stitched together into one glorious image just for you. So go ahead and click on it to see it in it’s full glory. We go all out for our readers.

Deadly Menace

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There are many dangerous things in the mountains here in Colorado. Some are very obvious, the western Rattlesnake, angry beavers, the Unibomber, well he isn’t here so much anymore, but one of the deadliest is our State flower the Columbine. Yeah, sure they look harmless and they’re pretty, some might even say beautiful, but therein lies their menace. Just like their sister in crime that Venus fly-catcher trap thing that lives somewhere else and does deadly stuff, these harmless appearing flowers sit in the dappled sunshine of a shady grove and startle you with their absolute undeniable beauty.

To illustrate just how dangerous these innocent looking flowers can be we asked our resident Flowerologists the twin PhD’s, Drs. Solenoid and Nodule Stem about them. We here at the World Headquarters of our Media Empire sponsor a lot of freeloaders, I mean researchers for a small cut of their grant money and the publishing rights to any lucrative research they might accidentally produce. They couldn’t wait to describe their deadly encounter with these harbingers of evil.

The Drs. Stem had been on a field trip to discover whether any of the flowers pictured in their “Flowers of The Rocky Mountains” guidebook actually grew here. As this was a government-funded project they were obligated to obtain results and had struggled for weeks trying to show some sort of progress. The pressure to protect their phony-baloney jobs I mean large, tax deferred grant was paramount.

So with these discouraging thoughts weighing heavily on their minds they were totally unprepared for the radiant gorgeousness that suddenly appeared before them.  Solenoid, being the older of the two twins by three days, and some say the more intelligent one, immediately spun around to warn his brother Nodule to cover his eyes before they were damaged beyond repair by the insidious beauty lashing out at them in shades of Columbine blue and pestle and/or stamen yellow. Instead of protecting his sibling he accidentally struck him with the tripod he was carrying knocking out his gold tooth and causing him to drop his notebook with all their irreplaceable data in it.

Of course while looking for his tooth he accidentally kicked his notebook under a rock and it was lost forever, the big dummy. At least that’s what they told the people administering their grant, hoping to salvage something out of the catastrophe. I can’t begin to tell you how disappointed we were with the Drs. Stem. The grant was gone, our sponsorship fee was gone, everything was a total screw up I mean, in disarray.

We don’t like failure here at the World Headquarters of our Media Empire and take any very poorly. Very poorly indeed. But life goes on, the Drs. Stem are out in the forest turning over rocks hoping to find grubs which they say are very nourishing. Their petition for the return of their cafeteria privileges is on my desk and I intend to look at it, perhaps as soon as next month, and we are still dedicated to the research necessary to maintain our position as one of the premier research facilities anywhere on this planet.

The only bright spot to come out  of this whole mess was our ability to point out the dangers that lurk in our natural environment so that you, our most favored readers, can remain safe while visiting our gorgeous state. Remember, let’s be safe out there, not everything is as it seems even the really pretty stuff.

Muley Point

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Well maybe you are at a point in your life where everything seems a little unsatisfactory, maybe even a little boring. You’re at your job and it may seem as if you will be at your job forever, stuck there when you rather be off doing something carefree, exciting, out of the ordinary, wild. But you know, common sense rears its ugly head and you understand that you can’t just drop everything and run off to do the wild thing, you have responsibilities and you are a responsible person. But man, wouldn’t it be cool if you could suddenly transport yourself somewhere else, like into the mind of one of these wild horses running free up on the high plateau of Muley point. To experience what they experience, to feel the solid thud of your hooves hitting the ground, the wind blowing through your mane, your only worry finding the next grazing site. You can find comfort in the fact that in this chaotic time we live in there are still those beings that are free, like these broomtails racing towards the waterhole, unaccountable to anyone but themselves, just happy to be alive and hopefully it will help get you through another day, I know it works for me.

To Whom It May Concern

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To all of my readers (and you know who you are) that check out my posts only occasionally, remember to click on the “home” tab above the post’s title when you are done reading it. This will show all the postings that have happened while you were away doing something truly important. When you click the link in your email that I send you notifying you of a new posting you are taken to the page of that day’s post but you don’t see all the other postings that were published while you were gone, that is unless you go to the home page. I know, I know, it sounds nuts that someone wouldn’t read the blog every day but things happen. You get in a fight with your sister, you can’t find your computer, you get divorced, you have to paint your toenails, you have to get your truck out of the impound lot, lots of important stuff happens that might cause you to skip a day but you want to be able to see what you’ve missed, don’t you? Sure you do, so remember, read the new post then go to the home page to check if you’ve missed anything and you’re done for the day. You’re happy, I’m happy and all is right with the world.

Oh, and one more thing. If you enjoy the blog, or you just want to inflict this misery on others, please, please, please (always beg in triplicate) pass this fount of wisdom, creativity, mass mayhem, unusual use of photons and the written word, on to whomever you think might take the bait I mean enjoy it. We need readers and subscribers desperately if we’re ever going to be taken seriously by the New York Times and you and only you can help us. So spread the word, we need dozens if not millions of new readers, now, and we’re not fooling. Help us readers, it’s your civic duty. Thank you and may Goodness descend upon you like a huge fuzzy comforter filled with warm little squiggly things that make you feel good. P.S. also tell them to subscribe, they’ll feel better about this whole thing and so will I.