A Promise...

I made this internal promise to myself to not talk about politics here.....cuz I can't and won't compete with those who have drank the Konservative Kool-Aid, and besides, they're much more eloquent and have a much bigger BS machine than liberals like me...facts don't stack up well against brilliant and manipulative prose and, in some cases, outright lies. Lies fed to the public by Fox News are so much easier to believe, as all they require is a sheep-like mentality to believe. So, instead, when i have something political to say....i'll just do a linky.

Weather is fine and dry and cool. The garden spiders are fat and sassy in my garden, happily catching big grasshoppers. I have their locations marked with flags so I don't run into them accidentally...I am terrified of large spiders. The Canadian Geese are forming their v-shapes going nowhere...they don't migrate anymore, but they look good faking it. I remember one clear day, early last November...I went outside for some reason or another, and what must have been every last sandhill crane (the bird in the picture) in NE Illinois was migrating south...there were hundreds of them, way high up, in huge wobbly "V" shapes, making quite a clacketty racket. They fly high and talk a lot! You can hear them way before you see them. In early March, when I went to visit my parents in Florida..there were lots of sandhill cranes there. They were getting into groups and getting ready to fly north again. i am happy to say I get to hear their voices on the way home, too.

The thing for me was knowing what I was hearing before I actually knew what they were...I instinctively knew they were cranes, and probably sandhills. my mother taught me, as a small child, that cranes fly with their necks outstretched, herons fly with their necks tucked in. She learned this on the farm in Ohio that she was born on in 1920. There must have been sandhills coming through there 80 years ago. She also taught me that vultures soar with wings in a "V" shape(a dihedral)...hawks soar on flat wings, and when the leaves on trees show you their backsides..you are going to have rain within 48 hours.

There is little or no chance of me seeing a whooping crane, though one did show up at Glacial Park last fall, on it's way south. Whooping Cranes are very, very rare. They are our other crane. There are only 5 species of cranes in the whole world, and all of them are endangered.

The Sandhill Cranes preen themselves with vegetation, which can have a high iron oxide content, so in my area, they tend to be a brownish-grayish red kind of colour. Baby cranes are called colts, BTW.