Magnus Goes North With Summer, Day 15

Tuesday June 10

Wow—I got up at 5:30 and the sun was already up. My weather app says it’s 60 degrees but with the breeze off the lake it feels much cooler.

Now that I’ve heard a pheasant call, and know what it is, I hear them all over. The call, hwah-hwa, reminds me of a child’s toy train whistle. 

It was a very slow and boring drive, the best kind. We arrived early, 1:25 or less, even with the time change back to Central time causing us to lose an hour. During the drive I actually saw a few birds—meadowlarks, possible bobolinks, nighthawks, and one big brownish bird that could possibly have been a golden eagle. Will never know. 

The day’s drive ended up at Oahe Downstream Recreation Area.  I wrote a review of this, so I’ll leave the detailed descriptions to tomorrow’s entry. Let me just say, any place that starts off with me seeing a Horned Lark—new life bird!!!--at the dump station while we were filling our freshwater tank, is a great place. 

Oahe is a huge reservoir and the river downstream of it, where we were camped, is very large too. I suspect it’s damned again somewhere further downstream. The campground was gorgeous with sites right on the river bank and nothing but bank on the other side. I know it’s hypocritical of me to enjoy camping on a river bank that has been cleared of its undergrowth and set up with bathrooms, campsites, and roads, and therefore ruined for anyone on the other side to enjoy looking at. But I’ll just have to suffer my own hypocrisy and enjoy it all the same. Not that I would encourage developing riverbanks for campgrounds, but since it’s already done….

On our long walk Molly and I went back to the dump station in search of horned larks, but none appeared this time. Then we went around the campground loop despite the sun and heat (it was in the mid-eighties or so and felt hotter.) It was a very large campground with a lot of spacing between sites. And not very many of them were occupied.  All the way down at the end was the hangout for geese and cormorants—very lovely little assortment of them across the river.

Birds: Western Grebe, probable red-shafted flicker, pelicans, cormorants, geese, 2 female pheasant, orchard oriole male and female, Eastern Kingbird, Western Kingbird.

Horned Lark

Can almost see the "horns" here

Western Grebe, cool!