Brad Sondahl's blog

Brad's Blog

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May 4th

I'm confident that the Easter egg hunt derives from the necessity of locating loose hens' nests in the spring in rural cultures. We have two hens, and one of them started escaping the enclosure this spring... We found her on her hidden nest by one of our grape arbors (or more accurately, morasses). She had two eggs, so I marked one with a marker and harvested the other.

Some white crowned sparrows have turned up in our yard, and we have not often seen them locally so I took a few photos... They are a western US breed.

Yesterday I worked my way up the moist dark wooded gully and found over a dozen blooming calypso orchids, which I photograph every year to try to
catch their elegant beauty...

May 5

Balsam root wildflowers at Sullivan Park in Spokane yesterday... These hardy flowers seem to thrive on sundrenched ridges blooming quickly before dying off for the rest of the year...

May 6
We have sort of resolved to get out into nature on Mondays, in a slightly more exploratory way than the usual walks and bike rides that are our daily encounters. Being a relatively calm blue sky day with the first time 70 degrees was likely to be attained, we canoed nearby Upper Twin Lake, which sports a floating peat bog and lots of waterfowl. We saw a dozen great blue herons, many mergansers, grebes, eagles, and ospreys...

Here's an osprey well lit by the bright sun...

We're about average birders, as such we often avoid trying to identify gulls, which all look pretty gully. The black tip around the beak makes this one, I think, a ring-billed gull...

Here's an osprey with a large catfish (you can see the cat whiskers even...)

May 8
Photos and videos from last weekend's showcase: http://www.sondahl.com/events/INBMAMay2019.html

May 11

May 12
Along the roads and on the rocks it's time for phlox!

May 14
As spring progresses, I get busier and sometimes don't get photos of the later flowers. Here are some:

Columbia Virgin's Bower wild clematis

Serviceberry

Piper's anemone (just learned the name this year from the Wilsons, who have a native plant nursery nearby)

May 19
Jonathan Hawkins and I did a British Invasion concert at the local library yesterday, and I recorded some but a technical glitch left one channel quiet, so I just posted this as a sample: https://youtu.be/Usi0iAyMX3s

books read

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. There are a lot of directions this novel could have taken, being essentially fantasy. Sort of enduring love story worked pretty well... The premise was shaky.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. When I was a child I read and saw The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, about a mysterious circus that changed people's lives. Even though Tony Randall sucked as Dr. Lao, the stop motion animation more than made up for it... Anyway the Night Circus reminded me of that experience. It was purposefully disjointed, and bounced around in time and point of view more than I am comfortable with, but it was unpredictable in outcome and an interesting adventure...

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