Geese and more

This is a fairly big photo update covering the past 6+ months, including:

• Images of a sphinx moth in Newton Hills State Park last summer, and a few other images around the park and my yard.
• Trail camera images from March to September from my cameras in Wind Cave National Park, including the full sequence (7 shots) of an elk trying to scratch itself with its antlers. As you may notice, there are some color differences between the Reconyx images at the start and the Moultrie images later on. The Reconyx images appear greenish, and the Moutrie images appear reddish. I've tried to remove the color cast to some extent, but I'm not going to fiddle with it too much. By the way, I am retiring the very old Bushnell which suffers from inferior image quality and short battery life. I have a new Primos camera on order that I will deploy at some point. The biggest problem I see with trail cameras is image quality. The Primos is relatively inexpensive but is supposed to have above average image quality. We'll see.
• A few shots from a November trip to New Mexico, including Bosque del Apache NWR and White Sands National Monument.
• A recent quick trip to Squaw Creek NWR in northwest Missouri.

The trips to the two wildlife refuges in late November and early December were quite different experiences. I have been to Bosque del Apache NWR in New Mexico many times. For this late in the year I was expecting many cranes and geese, and a number of raptors. For whatever reason, the migratory bird numbers were down and there were no raptors in view. On the positive side, the snow geese were close enough to provide opportunities to photograph individuals and small groups. A highlight was seeing a leucistic sandhill crane. The crane had mostly white feathers, but it still had the red patch on the head and colored eyes so it was not an albino. Refuge staff said this was the bird's second year on the refuge. Seeing this bird reminded me of the leucistic penguin I saw in Antarctica 12 years ago.

I've also been to Squaw Creek NWR in Missouri many times. Even though the geese were further away than in New Mexico, there were such massive numbers that it was easy to get the huge group shots you will see in the slide show. I also saw 15 eagles and a few hawks in the refuge, which is a low number compared to previous years, but I've included a few shots of those.

Click on one of the images below to start the 49-image slide show.

Newton Hills

Trail Camera

New Mexico

Missouri

Sturgis at 75

I am compelled to comment on the 75th edition of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which is wrapping up this weekend. I drove through the Black Hills a couple weeks ago and already significant motorcycle traffic was evident, lending credence to the expectation that this year's rally would be a monster with attendance approaching 1 million bikers.

Many of the articles leading up to the 75th rally mentioned its start in 1938, giving credit to J.C. "Pappy" Hoel as the founder. I claim a unique perspective on the rally because, although I have never driven a motorcycle in my life, I was a reporter for the Sturgis weekly newspaper 1978-84, and I met with Clarence (as locals called him) and his wife Pearl at their home soon after I started at the paper. I remember him as a cordial but sort of deaf old gent. He talked about working as a young man in the family business, which was cutting and storing ice in the winter and delivering it in the summer. In 1936 when refrigeration was making ice delivery obsolete, he bought an Indian motorcycle franchise. Clarence founded the Jackpine Gypsies motorcycle club in 1936 and helped start the rally in 1938. I got the impression that he didn't want to take personal credit for founding the rally, but whether that was due to modesty or embarrassment about the crazier aspects of it, I'm not sure. Whenever I dealt with him after that initial interview, it didn't have to do with "the Rally," but with the White Plate Flat Trackers, an organization he helped found in 1979-80 that was devoted to preserving the history of motorcycle racing. ("White Plate" refers to the white numbered plate awarded to expert riders, and "Flat Track" was the dirt track upon which they raced.)

Part of my beat was city and county government, so I covered countless meetings where rally proponents and opponents came to debate whether the town should continue hosting this insane event. A near-riot by campers in the city park one year led to a series of meetings and a public vote. I wrote an opinion column in the paper advocating that the rally should continue because it was the thing that made the town unique. Without it, Sturgis would be just another ranch town like Belle Fourche. (No offense.) Proponents narrowly won the vote, but there were changes – camping was banned in the park and much of the partying moved, out of sight and out of mind, to new private campgrounds outside of city limits, such as the Buffalo Chip.

In 1989, nearby Deadwood embraced part of its dark history. Gambling was legalized, revitalizing that little town. Today there are dozens of casinos and hotels in Deadwood. Without Deadwood gambling and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, there still would be tourists in the Black Hills, but not nearly as many. Whatever judgments you want to make, moral or otherwise, those two decisions made back in the 1980's bring millions of dollars to the northern Black Hills each year.

Being in the middle of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was part of my job, not something I would do on my own time. These days I live 375 miles to the east and usually visit the Black Hills in the spring and fall when the roads aren't clogged with bikers and RVs. But the rally is a unique event and I'm always interested to see (on TV, not in person) what is going on.

A t-shirt from 1981, one of my few Sturgis souvenirs. The event has gone by various names over the years.

Photo of the Year 2014

How about that, until now (August 2015) I neglected to choose a Photo of the Year for 2014. There's no doubt I've spent less time hunting with my camera the last few years but I did get a few decent shots during the 2014. Nominees were the partial solar eclipse and my first photo of a Baltimore Oriole, but I picked a webcam shot of an elk framed by another elk's antlers. I have been diligent about checking my webcams in Wind Cave National Park every six months. First prize, which I award to myself every year, is a trip to Keokuk, Iowa to see wintering eagles, although I neglected to make the trip this year. Here is this year's POY and previous winners.

Looking back on the previous selections, I was wondering if I should pick a photo of the decade, but it is too hard. The 2003 penguins were snapped during the greatest adventure of my life, a trip to Antarctica. "Little Brothers" from 2004 ended up on the cover of a book. After I clicked the owl picture in 2008, I was thinking about retiring then because I didn't know if I would ever top it. Maybe the Sertoma Butterfly from 2011 comes close. So there will be no "photo of the decade" selection. Click on the images for larger views.

Elk Frame 2014

Here are my POY selections for 2002-2013.

Junior I 2002

Gentoo Penguins 2003

Little Brothers 2004

Bald Eagle 2005

Blue Jay 2006

Eagle with fish 2007

Great Horned Owls 2008

Custer SP Bighorn 2009

Keokuk Eagle 2010

Sertoma Butterfly 2011

Dark Morph 2012

Night heron 2013

GOG

Every once in a while I have a hankering to watch a silly sci-fi movie, and this week I found GOG on Amazon Prime. It has its share of silly movie "science," but the premise is quite interesting: The story centers around a computer that, among other things, controls two robots, Gog and Magog. (Wiki says these names show up in the Old Testament in many different contexts, including the End of Days.) An unfriendly foreign government installed a Trojan Horse when the computer was being assembled by outside contractors, and are able to hack into the computer and control the robots and other systems. Several "accidents" and attacks occur before the intrusion is detected and stopped.

Have I mentioned this movie came out in 1954? In other words, more than 60 years after this movie was released the U.S. Office of Personnel Management is still too stupid to figure out that it might not be a good idea to trust outside contractors with access to confidential records. Although I have not received notice that my information has been compromised, as a former federal employee whose records were transferred to OPM upon my retirement, it appears I am at risk. Thanks Obama (and Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy and Eisenhower).

Black Hills

It's (almost) spring, and time for another trailcam check. I only had two cameras deployed due to a lock snafu with the third. The old Bushnell didn't deliver anything of note, but the newer Reconyx had some good nighttime shots of elk, a decent looking buck deer, and a couple of coyotes chasing through the snow. Strangely enough, there were absolutely no images from February, but some of the better nighttime elk and the coyotes were snapped during an early March snowstorm.

But what I'm showing here is (what I believe is) a yearling Bighorn that I snapped in Custer State Park while driving to the camera site in Wind Cave National Park. Click here for a slide show of the eight images.

Despite some frustration with another lock that I had to break, eventually, all three cameras including the Moultrie are now deployed a few hundred feet from each other in the national park.

Bighorn Yearling