A Late Report of an Early Thanksgiving

The California kids came the weekend before Thanksgiving, so they could be home before the traffic craziness. It was a short, fun visit.

It started with a visit to the horses.

Cedrus and Jessie Anne

Kestrel and Jessie Anne

Shirley was thrilled to have the boys here again. She hung out with Cedrus a lot.

Mister McCoy wanted attention too, but he is *so* big.

Steve and McCoy

Kestrel says hi to McCoy

Cedrus found the kitty, who our grandkids call Willow. We just call her kitty.

Whenever something else wasn't going on, Cedrus was playing the piano.

He is very good at the piano, but sometimes his position is a little odd.

Kestrel plays the guitar well. Here he is reading chords for a song from the web via an iphone (or something)

They had arrived Friday evening, the week before Thanksgiving Day. We ate our big turkey meal on Saturday. On Sunday, we went to Dallas to swim in the pool there. The boys love to swim. They both jumped off the diving board and tried diving off the side of the pool.

On Monday Johnny and the boys made sauerkraut. Here Kestrel adds salt to the shredded cabbage from Grandma's garden.

 It takes a lot of pounding to turn shredded cabbage into juicy cabbage..

Teamwork!

Munazza caught the action on her phone camera

Kestrel and Johnny poured the now-juicy cabbage into a plastic bag

Munazza took photos to document the procedure for Johnny's next talk at the boys' classrooms. It will take several months for the cabbage to ferment into sauerkraut.

 The boys wanted to hike to the river, of course. Here Cedrus stands beside his namesake tree, Cedrus deodora, in the arboretum. We're waiting to see how long it will take the tree to outgrow Cedrus.

 We crunched over lots of fallen leaves on our trip through the woods

The boys are way ahead.

Here come their mom, dad and grandpa

 
The creek was high and cold. Of course, Steve had to balance on a log jutting over the creek. The boys threw stick boats into the water.

There were lots of downed trees from a recent windstorm to get over on the way to and from the creek. Cedrus could go under this one.

 On the way back to the house through the arboretum, I had Cedrus stop the EZ Go by two other Cedrus trees, Cedrus atlanticas: Atlas Cedars.

This Cedrus atlantica is already taller than Cedrus

Two boys, two Atlas Cedar trees

 
Although it was Cedrus who did most of the driving of Johnny's EZ Go, now christened "Roustmobile Too", the photos I took were of Kestrel driving. He is the only one who goes slowly enough to get a picture of.

 While Kestrel drove around the arena, his dad snacked on rose hips.

 The night before they left for home, the boys gave us a concert. They alternated with Cedrus on the piano, then Kestrel on the guitar and singing. Grandma videotaped them.

 Although Cedrus has music books in front of him, he is not playing songs from them. He is playing other songs from memory.

 The photos below are still captures off the videotape.

Kestrel's dad served as a music stand

Kestrel singing and playing

 On Tuesday, Nov. 24th, they headed back south. They went through a snowstorm in the mountains between Oregon and California, but made it safely to Redding where they spent the night and drove home on Wednesday.

I'm glad we have videotapes to watch and remember. We're not sure where those kids got their musical talents, but very glad they did!

North Santiam Raptor Route... with camera

My raptor routes are more exciting... and taking longer... now that I have a new camera to play with. Today Johnny and I did our North Santiam route. It started out pretty exciting, with a distant Bald Eagle. But even before the eagle showed up, I decided to see what this camera would do with a Red-tail on a tree in the middle of a field where we often see a Red-tail. Here is the tree. It's the one way off in the distance that has a bare top bending to the right. Another hint: it is in the center of the photo.

I brought it a little closer. Now can you see the bent top tree?

On the left side of that bent tree sits a Red-tailed Hawk. It was visible only with my binoculars... and this camera.

Okay, now for the eagle. I caught a glint of white in the distance, put up my binocs, and saw the white head of an adult Bald Eagle. I did not have the good sense to bring it in little by little with camera shots, so here it is as seen from the car without the zoom.

Back home, I cropped that photo to zero in on the eagle tree, but that doesn't help much, does it? The eagle tree is left of the tall fir on the right in the photo below.

I cropped it still more. Now can you see the eagle on the top of the middle tree?

Here it is cropped again. Pretty fuzzy.

 And now back to the photos I took today... zoomed in. I couldn't hold the camera still, even propped against the window, so it is a little blurry.

Then I zoomed it all the way and couldn't even get the whole eagle in view!

I went back out a little... better, although it was looking the other way.

I did finally get it looking to the right but shook a bit so it is still blurry. I did not notice the wing feather askew until I saw these photos.

 On the same road where we saw the eagle, Fern Ridge Rd., Johnny's sharp eyes spotted a raptor on the dead top of a tree. That tree is just left of the barn in the foreground.

I zoomed in a bit. The raptor is close to the top of the visible part of this dead tree top.

Zoomed more, it begins to look like a Peregrine Falcon, with prey.

And here it is, with some unfortunate bird in its talons.

Closer and with the camera better braced.

And then eating the prey.

That was the last of the exciting raptor photos as we needed to arrive at our lunch spot at lunch time. We stopped along Fern Ridge Rd. when we knew we were about 20 minutes away from the Chinese Dragon restaurant in Mehama that is on our route... and called in our take-out lunch order. We took it to John Neal Park in Lyons and ate out on a picnic table with the sun warming our backs. It was a lovely day. I wandered around the ponds hoping to find the Red-shouldered Hawks we saw there two years ago, but no luck. I did find a female Northern Shoveler swimming through the reflections of colorful trees .

Here she is having a scratch.

 I love the wooded ponds at this park. They are beautiful all year but especially so in the fall.

On one pond, I found a group of Gadwalls. One male turned for a picture.

The trail eventually winds its way to the North Santiam River where a gravel bar in the middle of the river often has a Dipper foraging from a rock at its edge. And so it did today. The gravel bar is at the far side of the river in the center of this photo.

Here it is a little closer.

The Dipper was feeding off a round rock to the right (upstream) of the gravel bar.

I took this photo of the Dipper's rock while the Dipper was under water. It is the round rock in the middle right with sun glinting off it.

Here it is with Dipper. Each time the Dipper dove, it came up with something to eat.

 I was thrilled that my camera could capture the Dipper from so great a distance. But we were running late now with half the route yet to drive, so we left beautiful John Neal Park and I put the camera away. We stopped, as always, at the cemetery on our route where my parents are buried. It made me happy to see that Mom's hardy cyclamen and primrose were still alive, in spite of the hot dry summer. One more non-raptor stop to say hi to friends in Gates, then we headed back for the return part of our route through fields north of the North Santiam Highway until we arrived again at Salem, our starting point.

Our total raptors were about average for this route in November: 12 Red-tailed Hawks, 15 American Kestrels, 4 Northern Harriers, 1 Bald Eagle, 1 Cooper's Hawk and 1 Peregrine Falcon. But I had above average fun taking photos of  far away birds.