Desk-bound Nature Lover

My Blog: Occasional postings about the joys of birding, hiking, camping, and sightseeing.

My life: I spend most of my days in offices, looking at a computer screen, and waiting for those few weekends when I can get out and enjoy some remnant of our precious natural heritage. But, boy, do I live on those weekends!

Monday, June 27, 2005

Can you tell Pat Robertson from Osama bin Laden?

This is something cute I found on the internet.

Can you tell a hate-filled religious bigot in a turban from a hate-filled religious bigot in a business suit if all you can see is their rhetoric? Take the quiz at funnystrange.com and find out. The quiz consists of twenty quotes, some from Osama bin Laden and some from Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. Your task is to pick which quotes come from the Arab bigot and which ones come from an American bigot. I couldn't tell the difference. My score was only 12 out of 20.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Ice Age Weekend and a Movie

Ice Age Weekend
My son and I spent the weekend camping at Kettle Moraine State Forest (Northern Unit) in Wisconsin. For those of you who are rusty on geology, a moraine is a ridge formed by the gravel and stone pushed in front of a glacier. A kettle is a depression formed when a large block of ice is left behind by a retreating glacier, becomes buried, and then melts. Often, these kettles fill with water and are then called kettle lakes. The Kettle Moraine area, near Milwaukee, is full of these and other Ice Age remnants, and is a fine area for camping, hiking, and other outdoor activities.

(For those who prefer the “intelligent design theory”, I suppose I should give equal time to the view that all the geological features mentioned above were made instantly by divine fiat a week ago Thursday.)

We left home about five-thirty PM on Friday, after I finished work for the day and packed the car with our camping gear. It would have been about a two hour drive from our home in the North Suburbs, but some slow traffic in the Milwaukee area added about an hour to that.

The campground we stayed at was on a kettle lake called Mauthe Lake. Our own site was up on a high ridge, back a ways from the lake. It was not too close to the other camp sites which made getting to sleep at night easier. After we set up our camp, we walked down to the lake and along the lake until it started to get dark, and then returned to our tent for the night.

Saturday morning we went to the Ice Age Visitors Center, a few miles north of our campsite, to take part in a naturalist program for children. There were about a dozen children there with their parents. The Big Guy was one of the oldest ones. Recommended ages for the program were six to twelve, so he was near the upper limit of that range, but we had fun. The program mostly involved looking for the tiny animals which live in the soil and leaf litter of prairie or forest. The afternoon and early evening were spent hiking through the woods on the moraine and along Mauthe Lake.

Late in the evening, we went to another family naturalist program, this one on astronomy. We learned how to find the summer constellations, and looked at the three planets, Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury, which were visible in the evening sky.

Sunday morning was spent packing up our camp gear and canoeing. We rented a canoe on Mauthe Lake, and paddled all around the lake and about a mile or so up a slow, meandering creek which feeds into the lake. The creek, particularly, was beautiful, lined with willows and alders, with blue irises in bloom along the banks.

All the time we had our ears and eyes open for birds. Our camp site was surrounded by Eastern Towhees calling their name, “tow HE-EE-EE”, and House Wrens with their gurgling song. In the woods we were always hearing the insistent chant of Ovenbirds and whistled phrases of Red-eyed Vireos. Along the stream, we continually heard the dry trill of Swamp Sparrows and the “witchity-witchity-witchity” of Yellowthroats.

We were able to identify 60 bird species during our stay. Here is the list of the birds we found. Great Blue Heron, Turkey Vulture, Canada Goose, Roughed Grouse, Killdeer, Black Tern, Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Barred Owl, Chimney Swift, Belted Kingfisher, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Downy Woodpecker, Hairy Woodpecker, Northern Flicker, Eastern Wood-Pewee, Acadian Flycatcher, Alder Flycatcher, Willow Flycatcher, Eastern Phoebe, Great Crested Flycatcher, Warbling Vireo, Red-eyed Vireo, Blue Jay, American Crow, Tree Swallow, Barn Swallow, Black-capped Chickadee, Red-breasted Nuthatch, White-breasted Nuthatch, House Wren, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Veery, American Robin, Gray Catbird, Cedar Waxwing, Blue-winged Warbler, Yellow Warbler, Chestnut-sided Warbler, Black-throated Green Warbler, Ovenbird, Common Yellowthroat, Hooded Warbler, Scarlet Tanager, Eastern Towhee, Chipping Sparrow, Field Sparrow, Song Sparrow, Swamp Sparrow, Northern Cardinal, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Indigo Bunting, Red-winged Blackbird, Common Grackle, Brown-headed Cowbird, Baltimore Oriole, and American Goldfinch.

A Movie
After the Big Guy and I got back from our camping trip, the family decided to take me out to dinner for Father’s Day, and then to a movie. The movie we picked was the new Miyazaki movie, “Howl’s Moving Castle”.

In my household we are all huge fans for Hayao Miyazaki, and me as much as anyone. In my profile, I list “Princess Mononoke” as one of my favorite movies, but I could almost as readily have named “Spirited Away” or “My Neighbor Totoro”, also directed by Miyazaki. (“Kiki’s Delivery Service” and “Naussica of the Valley of Winds” are also quite good.) Yeah, these are all animated children’s movies, but they are children’s movies which are worth watching even if you don’t have children watching them with you. (Actually, “Princess Mononoke” is not appropriate for younger children.)

Unfortunately, “Howl’s Moving Castle” is not the equal of “Princess Mononoke” or “Spirited Away”. But even second-rate Miyazaki is well worth watching on the big screen. Ever since Disney’s “Aladdin”, most American family movies are too busy trying to be hip and trendy to ever get around to doing anything really interesting. It’s nice that Miyazaki is still making movies which aspire to something more.