Listening to the Ice Move

It's unseasonably warm today, and, unfortunately, seasonably sticky, assuming the season for the latter is a Minnesota summer. I decided a remedy to Daddy's sleeping all day long would be to bundle him in the car and take a drive up to Crex Meadows to see what spring has brought.
The trip itself depended on weather, of course, and it was forecast to be perfect for such an expedition: a bulk of several afternoon hours between thunderstorms.

These days it's even more of an event than, say, last year. One O2 bottle, for example, would have sufficed then. Today he went through both and still ran out by the time he had to walk into the house. Then though it's very warm and he'd be inside the car the whole time, he insisted on having his hat. No jacket, but the more I insisted he didn't need the hat either the crabbier he became.

He got his hat.

I lost half my view out the side window.

This hat is a straw hat with a wide brim and a green plastic visor/shade extending well out over the front. I presume it's like portable sunglasses for the hat wearer. For the person nearby, it's an obstacle. Whatever.

Driving into Wisconsin, we saw the last of the snow for this season - we hope. There were mounds left in large parking lots and where there had been drifts under the north side of dense trees. Ice on the ponds is mostly or all melted, depending on their size. Ice on lakes is very black, and very broken up.

Since this is about ice, I won't bore you with trumpeter swans sightings, or sandhill cranes, harrier hawks, Canada geese, loons, mallards, buffle heads, redwing blackbirds, courting frogs, pussy willows, bad roads, or any of the other things the camera and I found interesting. These are common at Crex. But there was one thing that was new to me today.

I always go by Phantom Lake when I enter the area. Today there were few birds there since the lake was still mostly ice covered. However, as I proceeded through, I soon realized it wasn't as simple as a solid sheet. The lake was covered by a combination of large solid sheets and areas covered in floating ice bits. If you sorted out the textures for a bit, you could soon easily tell which was which.

Especially if you stood still.

There was a stiff south wind blowing, and the large sheets were moving north, pushing their way between other sheets through gaps of open water left from other sheets moving by. The big sheets were in turn pushing the small bits out of their way, and where gaps were narrow, that meant pushing them up onto adjoining sheets.

Where the bits floated on the water, they were as black as the big sheets, just lumpy and uneven in texture. Where they got pushed up out of the water, they instantly turned white, even in the lower light levels of a still very cloudy day. And if you were very quiet, with the car engine turned off and conversation stilled, you could hear the gentle tinkling of the ice bits colliding and shoving and piling up.

Good ears of course helped. Daddy no longer can hear soft things with higher pitches, so he missed the ice music. While he sat and watched the large sheets move, I stood, and photographed, and listened. Just listened.

And wished I'd thought to bring the camcorder too.

I Won!

No, not the lottery. Yet....

But the results are finally in from the Crex Meadows 2010 Photo Contest, where top two in each category make it into the calendar for the next year.

I thought I'd missed the deadline. It was close. I knew it was just after we'd get back from vacation, and with all the chaos, I just let it go until after we got back. When I remembered to check the date, it had just ended, minutes before.

Dang!

I checked in again a few days later for something else, and they had extended the deadline. Time to get busy! I had one day! They needed an 8x10 and an e-file.

I dug out the laptop - completely untouched all vacation long in its place in the RV with all the electrical issues we'd had and the fact I hadn't actually needed it - and found the picture I'd had in mind. It had been taken years before during a presentation on site. It was a close-up of a horned owl, rather wet because it had been raining. In fact, that had been the hook the presenter used to get our attention: "What does an owl do in the rain?" After we all went out, a whole lot of folks who couldn't kill their flash found out the owl eyes in a flash picture are yellow with red pupils like little winged devils. I got a few of those. But I also killed my flash for a whole bunch of shots, and of those I selected one where the owl's beak is open with its tongue showing. (See it here on my blog.)

I wasn't sure such an "unwild" shot was what the contest sponsors had in mind, but I sent along a note explaining that I thought their sponsored events were as important a part of what they do as letting us drive unsupervised around the place hoping to find something worth shooting. With our cameras, of course, though most of Crex is open to hunters in the proper seasons, and is in fact financially supported by them. On the day I dropped off the picture, I took my dad along for a drive and we had a great time.

The following weekend I took him along when I went up again to vote, and they obligingly sat him right in front of the big hi-def TV they use for a pair of gorgeous videos for his own private viewing. He says he saw a lot of it that way, despite his vision. (At least the sound was good, music, bird calls, etc.) Then we two drove around while I took some more pictures. Never too soon to try for next year's contest, after all.

Most years they post the results right away.

Nothing.

I thought somebody hadn't gotten around to posting it on the website. Maybe they had some kind of glitch? I also figured that since I hadn't heard anything via email, my picture wasn't a winner. After all, it was entry #26 just in the birds category, and I hadn't counted to see just how many entries there were. The competition was fierce. Seeing the pictures alone is a great reason to visit.

Today I checked out their website for something else, and there it was: the winners were finally posted. Some explanation about lots of counting. May as well see who I lost to, eh? And there, on the top line of three pictures, was my owl, in second place. I made the calendar!

Some of you might expect a flat package this year for X-mas. Just so you know.

Owl in the Rain

What does an owl do in the rain?

This was the teaser question posed by the lecturer to pique our interest in his presentation. He was offering a lecture/photo op on a rainy weekend day a couple of years ago at Crex Meadows. He invited us and our cameras outside to find out for ourselves. There was a wide overhang of roof over a concrete pad and benches, plenty of room for those of us who followed him out, both to get the information he offered, and pictures without getting our cameras wet.

He brought along a great horned owl and a red-tailed hawk, both on stands out in the yard, in the wet. We could shoot to our heart's content, provided we could find a space between two other people and nobody was rude enough to walk in front of our lens. Picking your background was another issue. If you wanted shots of a crowd of people looking at and shooting a couple of birds, here was your big chance! If you wanted evil-looking bird with red and yellow eyes, just leave on the flash. Apparently lots of people did. If you wanted woodsy and natural looking, well, that called for more patience and the ability to block flash.

So what does an owl do in the rain? He gets wet, of course!