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Saturday, January 15

My friend Charly comes up from Oregon to join on the trip today. We walk the portage to the south lagoon on a reasonably calm day with a heavy overcast and a gray tone on everything. It is just a heavy day with a weather change to strong winds and rain predicted for Sunday. We will probably have the lake to ourselves.

examining a mushroom under a deadfall, east of the burial island

Ducks always act just a bit different when weather is coming. They lay low, the flock a bit farther out in the bay, sometimes they move out of one lagoon and into another. I point out a kingfisher, a great blue heron, the buffleheads, we pass the hidden beaver lodge, the workbench lodge, the underwater debris field north of Marsh island. We paddle the very edge of birch island and #2 island hoping for a snipe to be flushed, but it is too gray and they have not come to the waters edge, at the base of the cattails to bask in the sun.

We visit the NE lagoon and I point out the large bald eagle nest. A heron is standing in a normal spot there, but just standing and not hunting, so we move on heading out to the dirtberg scaring off the cormorants and sanderlings, to the great displeasure of the sanderlings who circle and whirl until we leave. I dig out some of the dirtberg with my paddle to show how it is a dense peaty mass, a not quite mud held together by fibrous remains of plants...it holds its shape as well as a piece of cake.

There are fours swans near the east shore and we head in a little closer. They spook at over 100 yards but stay low and only move a short ways off. All I wanted was for Charly to hear the flapping of their huge wings, the sound of a large flag in the wind, and the cartoon honk/beep of their call.

mushroom under the tree in the above photo

We then steer wide of them and head for the east marsh to visit the cattail peninsula that once was an island before it picked itself up and moved. It begins to rain a rain that will not let up for awhile and we pass once more through the south lagoon on our way to the ancient portage getting a little wetter as we go.