Hello hello, toodlydoo and twumbledydum, how was your week? Mine was a week like any other of the past thirty-eight weeks (but who’s counting?)…..
We hiked…
I spent interminable amounts of time in the studio waiting (patiently) for someone to play with me
I stoically watched amazing things come out of the oven…
that I would never get to eat….
Yes. A week like any other. Until we were driving to our hike this morning and Caryn suddenly said, “Wait, is that a coyote?! Can we stop?!!” Richard pulled over to the one little slip of public beach along Lake Whatcom and Caryn hopped out and …left me behind! Well you better believe that I barked
and I sniffed
and I craned my neck to see what was going on. I couldn’t smell a coyote (or what I thought a coyote would smell like)…but there was something on the beach….
and there were all those Canadian geese hanging around, which seemed a little odd, given that there was this coyote-looking-but-not-smelling-like-a-coyote thing out there…Caryn moved in closer…and closer….to discover…..
a faux-coyote!! I will say I was a little envious of that tail…but HAH!
So much for all the excitement. Until Caryn turned and saw, on the water….Trumpeter swans from Alaska!
Those cool, stately birds that we see in the fields in Skagit had come to visit the Lake.
I watched them too, and then they did this funny thing, which made them not-so-stately
Alarming! But after a little dip, back they were, cool as cucumbers and acting like nothing had happened. Caryn called that odd behavior “dabbling”, or “up-ending” but I think “bottoms-up” describes it better. Apparently there’s something good to eat down there in the water. They joggle their legs around in the water to stir things up and dislodge underwater grasses, and then go bottoms-up to feed. And by the way, those gray ones are young ones. The males and females are both snow white.
These huge swans came dangerously close to extinction; in the 1940’s there were only about 69 of them left. But conservationists have helped them to come back, and now there are around 13,000 of them. Wouldn’t it be grand to see that many?
OK, I’ve got to give you some cool facts about Trumpeter Swans:
They mate for life
They warm their eggs with their webbed feet
They can weigh a lot for a bird – up to 26 pounds – and they can be 6 feet in length, with a 8 foot wing span. That makes them America’s heaviest water fowl. Because of their mass, they need 100 yards to take off on the water – they run on the water’s surface to take off!
And of course, they were named for the sound of their voice, which sounds like a trumpet.
After such an exciting day, I’m sleepy. Since I only got a two hour nap in this afternoon, I’m off to bed, tweedlydoo. Take care, stay safe, and many ♥♥♥ to you!