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There are the birds. The seagulls, as always, are everywhere. Not many, but singles, and in the vastness you can see one, then another, and another. They ride the cold wind on their boomerang wings, hovering up and down, sometimes diving.
It is windy so the great shucked wild rice stalks bend to 60°, and bend further to 45° under the red-winged blackbird. We are near Red Wing. This variety of wild rice is the tallest; I calculate seven feet; the book says up to ten. The blackbirds come in flocks and each blackbird in profile in the gray sky looks like a uniform black origami.
When I walk the wet willow islands, I spoke snipe and they flush from the matted green and brown grass and fly with a low whistle. Sometimes they fly in flocks, and at a distance their pattern resembles that of ducks, but their individual profile is compact with a needle nose.
In the water channel in the open water are rafts of thousands of mudhens – coots. They run and fly when a boat comes along, and they run out of nervousness when the eagle is in the air. You can shoot coots. You can eat them. Of course, you can eat just about anything. You can cook coot stew or stir-fried coot or pan-fried coot breast. I do not recommend any of this, strongly.
Where there are so many birds and carp and muskrats and swamp bucks, there are bald eagles. When they roost in the bare-naked silver maple when the shadows are just right in the gray dawn or dusk, they squat like vampires, like vultures, watching over the great river. And when they take to the wing – I have heard it said that the golden eagles are our largest eagle but having seen the bald from various distances I find it hard to believe – when the bald eagle takes to flight the ducks on the water get jittery and get up off the water and form flocks to find other, safer water in the river bottoms.
For ducks there are the quacking hen mallards, always quacking raspingly; their green-headed drakes; and the long-necked canvasback showing a lot of white; then the gadwalls showing a flashing white in the sun in big flocks, white from their secondary wing feathers, flashing white like the winter sparrows, and the male and female gadwall both looking like a very small hen mallard when brought to hand but with black bills, not orange.
Beyond there is the main channel on the Minnesota side and the smaller channel here with us, and great lakes up and down stream along either side. In the bottoms are the grass islands of soft maples and deer, and grass islands of willows and beaver, the willow leaves silver on one side and yellow-green on the other. In the water – this year we’re in only 18 inches (I know because I’m sitting in it) – there is sparse wild rice with some tall bent stalks and the rest down, then the thick deep brown and rusty-red and green nutgrass a couple feet tall that I kneel or sit in, and the cattails in flower. You know the cattails. And everywhere the dark, warm muskrat huts.
This part of the Old Man the bluffs from one side, Minnesota, to the bluffs on the Wisconsin side can be four miles apart. Up there are bare limestone faces, and hollows of creeks going up to the plateaus of Wisconsin or the plains of Minnesota. In this time of year there are the autumn colors of the leaves – October colors – Halloween colors – dull orange, yellow, many greens, shadowy black, splashing white, blood red. The colors of ducks. I love to capture these. I’m a student of colors.
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