How I spent my mini-vacation...these photos do not do the forest justice cause there ain't no audio. The bottom one is a picture of a nesting grouse (yes it is). I flushed it and it scared the shit out of us. Then we knew where its nest was so we scared it back a few times by trying to take its picture. Now we're gone so the poor little thing can get back to worrying about genuine predators. When we first got there we kept hearing a low kind of put-put-putting sound. VB said, "That's grouse." I said, "No, silly, that's a motor on a nearby farm." Then we played is-isn't for a couple of days, and came home to the bird book, which says this about ruffed grouse, "The drumming of the male might be overlooked as a distant motor starting up, or an outboard on some far-distant lake. The 'booming' starts off slowly, gaining speed until it ends in a whir: bup...bup...bup...bup..bup.bup. up. r-rrrrrrr. At a distance the muffled thumping is so hollow that sometimes it hardly registers as an exterior sound, but seems rather to be a disturbing series of vibrations within the ear itself."
the ball field
the orchard
the swamp
the grouse
return to: sally mckay and lorna mills
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