"If you live where you want to go on vacation, you will always be on vacation."
― Matt Fox
Though it was just a week with weekends, my vacation seemed much longer. Perhaps it was on account of the amount of time I spent outdoors hiking, birding, and insecting. I was fortunate to have what will probably be the best week of weather southern Wisconsin has for the entire year ― cool mornings but mild afternoons full of sunny skies. Oh, there was one rainy morning, but even that day gave way to clear skies by the noon hour.
Getting all the warblers (again) is certainly within reach, but it won't come without a trip to Wyalusing State Park for Kentucky and Yellow-throated Warblers. I rarely ever get Worm-eating Warbler at my regular birding haunts, but last year's visit to Pine Glen was a very memorable experience ― perhaps I'll do that again. And the Kirtlands + Prairie experience last spring? A repeat of that would be utterly amazing. Mostly, I kept to natural areas close to home, with just a few exceptions:
Baxter's Hollow
Deer Creek
Esser Pond
Governor’s Island
Graber Pond
Holy Wisdom Monastery
Hoyt Park
Indian Lake Park
Lakeshore Nature Preserve
Marshall Park
Nine Springs
Pheasant Branch Creek Corridor
Pope Farm Conservancy
Sauk City Canoe Launch
Spring Green Preserve
Stricker's Pond
From the above visits, I was able to glide past 200 bird species by the end of this weekend. Just this morning at the creek corridor my birding posse and I tallied 22 warbler species, which included Black-throated Blue and Hooded Warbler. On my way out heading up the ridge where I parked, I found a singing Prothonotary Warbler. I don't recall another day I was able to find my three favorite wood warblers at a single location. At the pond with no name known to me where Highway 14 meets Middleton, I had a fantastic outing with all five expected swallows, Sora, Virginia Rail, Yellow-headed Blackbird, and several Marsh wrens.
A day following my Spring Green trip, I was still on the prowl for Big Sand Tiger Beetles. A visit to the Sauk City Canoe Launch was extremely productive ― the place was literally crawling (and flying) with them. I think this may be some of my best-ever photographs of this species.
Naturally, spring migration is far from over, but I'm either going to have to restrict my forthcoming outings to weekends, or perhaps get to the creek corridor for an hour of early morning birding before work ― this may be necessary for finding a Connecticut Warbler, which is about due.
As for this blog's location, I think I'm going to just keep it here on Blogger for now. The accidental deleted posts and TOS violations were widespread throughout the Blogger blogosphere, and they were able to restore the lost content within a day. Having said that, I'm going to keep the WordPress location as a backup in the event something happens to Blogger down the road.
Blog posts will likely return to one per week again. I hope you've enjoyed all the work I put into it this past week ― it was as adventurous and relaxing as it all looks!
All images © 2021 Mike McDowell