Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

    Last week, while my daughter, Camille, and her oldest daughter, Justine were visiting, I recalled that there was a little park down on Lake Lucille that was populated with quite a number of wild Mallards and a few Grebes. I guess they're wild, although by the look of these pictures, I suppose they could be considered domesticated.  They certainly come running whenever anyone comes to the park and gets close to the water. Since we didn't have any stale bread we wanted to get rid of, I took several tubes of saltine crackers to feed them, along with some black sunflower seeds. Needless to say, they made short work of the food we brought them. Justine laughed with delight and of course tried to get them to eat out of her hand, which they didn't want any part of. Like most things we enjoy doing, once wasn't enough, so we made a second trip to the park to engage the feathered gluttons. This time I didn't bring saltines, I don't want them to end up with high blood ...

I was down at the harbor the other day to get a picture of Floyd Peterson. I wanted to get out of the house for awhile because it was sunny outside and I wanted to get the stink blown off. As I was driving around I happened to notice Floyd's boat drifting close to Graveyard Island with a pretty good sized flock of seagulls hanging around the stern. I had heard that there were a few kings around, so I figured he got his share. I went down to wait for him to come in and tie up. While I was there I noticed a lot of activity in the area around the floats. The gulls were agitated and there were a few eagles perched on the trolling poles of some of the boats. There was quite a large flock of Mergansers swimming in the harbor also. They are fish eating ducks, so in all my brilliance, I deduced that there must be some reason for the interest. As I was walking down the ramp I could see the dark line in the water that separated empty water from that which was teeming with life. For whateve...