"When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, like flute notes rising up, like the words of glass speaking. Then there comes a point when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light."
― Anne Spollen
"It is life, I think, to watch the water. A man can learn so many things."
― Nicholas Sparks
Lake Mendota's ice has completely melted. Yesterday while scoping the lake from several points along the western shore, I saw hundreds of Canvasback, Redhead, Ring-necked Ducks, and Lesser Scaup. Common Loons are back, but most will continue onto destinations in northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, and beyond. It was also nice to see a few Horned Grebes and Pied-billed Grebes. Other waterfowl on the lake included Ruddy Ducks, Common Goldeneye, Buffleheads, and Gadwall. At Stricker's Pond I added my first Red-breasted Mergansers of spring, but they kept to the middle and out of the range of my digiscoping rig.
Strong northwest winds have kept migration to a minimum this weekend. Still no Eastern Phoebe for me, but there were a few more Golden-crowned Kinglets along the creek corridor this morning. Dark-eyed Junco song has reached a fantastic crescendo of volume and variety ― one bird almost had me fooled for an early Pine Warbler, but I tracked him down and observed the culprit in the act.
Overall, somewhat of a quiet weekend ― those dang northwest winds. But next weekend is calling for sunshine and temperatures in the upper sixties, which will undoubtedly bring more migrants into southern Wisconsin. Oh boy! (Can we still say 'oh boy'?) In parting, here's a photograph of the Worm Moon. Or is it the Crow Moon? Sap Moon? Sugar Moon!? I'm so confused. Actually, it's just an ordinary full moon, photographed over a decade ago. Can you bother to look at an ordinary moon, or must it have some anthropomorphic meaning attached to it?
All images © 2021 Mike McDowell