Gabriel Bertilson writes

It has been a long time since I posted last, so I thought I’d post something at last. (I have also been both petitioned and threatened with tickling by various people to spur me on a bit.)

So, I decided to do a post of pictures, since I couldn’t readily come up with something philological. This is a post I’ve been thinking of writing for a long time, but haven’t quite ever finished.

On April 23st of this year, I went with my grandparents and a friend of theirs to see sharp-tailed grouse dancing at one of their leks in northern Minnesota, near McGregor, Minnesota, about fifty miles west of Duluth. We drove up the afternoon before and drove around Rice Lake National Wildlife Refuge.

Waterbirds are what Rice Lake is particularly noted for, but I took very few pictures of them since they were so far away. This seems to be a scaup.

I took a lot of pictures of a group of deer that we frightened as we drove towards them on the road.

We stopped at a beautiful little lake with lots of spruces and some birches around it (or those are the only trees that I could easily identify in their winter garb).

The woods below the road as it came towards the lake were very wet and an ideal place for moss to grow.

Beavers had been at work around the lake, and we had to skirt a little pool formed by a small dam built across the path.

Then we drove to find the way to the lek so that we wouldn’t get lost looking for it in the darkness of the early morning. This was a good idea, because the first gravel road we walked down was not the right one. We had walked very far down the road, but there was no way across the ditch to the right as the directions indicated. So, we went back and found that we had gone the wrong distance from the last county road.

We found our way to the right gravel road, and walked down between a field of pussy-willows to the left, and a ditch to the right.

There were two varieties of pussy-willows: the smaller-flowered kind with colorful stems (also the more common kind), and the larger-flowered kind.

We found the way across the ditch, and walked towards the blinds through a grassy area.

The blinds were kind of ramshackle things made out of plywood (or maybe it was cardboard) with windows cut out and buckets inside to sit on, placed on one side of the lek, which was mowed shorter than the surrounding grass so that the birds could more easily dance on it.

Then we walked out to the car and left to stay overnight in a hotel. And it looks like I’ll have to leave the actual grouse pictures for another post, since this one has grown very long already.