So Much to See, So Little Time
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Jim and Linda at Thanksgiving
Determined to pack as many trips as possible into the time left for travel to new places, we continued last year's policy of at least two birding expeditions.
We reported on January's unexpected trip to Taiwan in last year's report.
In July, having already done Antarctica, we decided to add the high Arctic to our list.
After a day in Oslo, we toured Svalbard aboard Ortelius, a sister ship of the Plancius, our ship in Antarctica.
The trip around the various islands of this far northern archipelago carried us to 81°11' North, about 600 miles from the North Pole.
We took lots of photos, mostly of flowers and polar bears, but with the occasional bird included.
A complete report on the trip is available as a PDF file.
Later, we toured Southern Ecuador with Mark Pretti, whom we immediately added to our list of favorite leaders. The Cloudmans joined us,
and we recruited two members of our Tuesday 4 the Birds group as well, so we knew most of the group. We have some of our photos from the trip and one of Terry's we borrowed
in our Ecuador Photos.
A report on the trip is available as a PDF file.
We put together a bound book of photos of the trip jointly with the Cloudmans. You can see it at the My Publisher site.
In addition to these trips, we took a strange cruise on a big liner. The ship had been plying the Caribbean, and was headed for Alaska.
We hopped on in San Diego and rode to Victoria, BC. The lure was the time spent in the California Current,
a cold water river flowing in the Pacific Ocean offshore California. Fish come there to feed, and birds come to eat the fish. The big ship was steady enough to let us set
up scopes on the deck to look at birds. As the ship was traveling north at a steady 18 knots, and the birds were seldom flying along the ship at that speed, we
found the birding difficult.
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Les, Linda, Jim, Linda and John Findlay at Anthony's in Seattle
Linda's sister, Leslie, met us in Victoria, and we spent one day at the famous Butchart Gardens before taking a ferry to Washington.
Then we wandered around the Olympic Peninsula for a bit before heading to Seattle, where we spent a couple of days before heading home.
In April, we drove back to Austin for Lindsey Hargrove and Michael Raspino's wedding. We drove straight there, but took our usual peripathetic trip home, birding along the way.
Bionic Birding
Linda knew that she was developing cataracts. Each year, the annual eye exam mentioned them and suggested waiting. This year, the waiting was over.
She had surgery to remove the cataracts and replace them with new lenses. “This is the only part that works better now than it used to,” she noted.
The result is not perfect. She still needs reading glasses, much to her annoyance. The new lenses were supposed to provide good close vision as well as far.
Of course, she can read fine without glasses when in the doctor's office.
Jim, meanwhile, got tired of answering questions about bird calls with, “Sorry, I didn't hear it.”
This problem first appeared in Uganda years ago, where he recorded the Siffling Cisticola with the notation, “call is inaudible.”
Back in the USA, he noticed that familiar calls such as the high single note of Cedar Waxwings and the even higher pitched song of Golden-crowned Kinglets
could no longer be heard unless the bird was very close. He invested in some hearing aids tweaked to accentuate the high frequencies.
Now, he has discovered many new bird calls that he can't identify. Still…
On to 2014
Best wishes for 2014.
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Granny and Nico
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Abe and Marilyn with Linda
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Rich and Roz Smucker with us in Unknown Location
Visitors are welcome Chez Hargrove. We had several visitors this year:
- Roz, our former foster daughter, and husband Rich
- Sandy Fowler, Hallie Hart, and Babs, their friend
- Abe and Marilyn, who got engaged in CA and married in Austin
- Granny and Flo, who came to see Nico for the first time.
Stay in touch. You can always reach us using the contact form on this website. You can also find Jim, and now Linda, on Facebook. Jim is on Twitter also, as Neoscona.
Blatantly Political Afterthoughts
We apologize if you are offended by our obviously biased views on politics in our fair country.*
These two cartoons seem to capture the spirit of the times.
*Actually, we aren't really sorry.
