Bird of the Week – Willow Ptarmigan
We’re still months from Spring, but it probably doesn’t violate Mudflats Rules to think about Spring. This male Willow Ptarmigan is in transition from winter to summer plumage. It’s an alpine bird, on the east end of the Denali Highway, where the spring comes a little later. The male trails the female’s molt by a few weeks, serving as a more obvious target for predators than the female, huddled on the eggs. For more bird photos, please visit Frozen Feather Images.
Good Tidings & Great Pain – The End!
I finished Sarah Palin’s Christmas book. I started it on November 19. It took me 49 days to read a 6″x8″ book with 209 pages of text, not including recipes. I admit, I’m not the fastest reader in the world, but bear in mind that I wanted to finish this book. I committed to reading the whole thing, and so completing it was the only way to make it stop. And now I have, and I can confidently say that Good Tidings and Great Joy is the most powerful misnomer for a book title I’ve ever encountered. It’s also the…
Good Tidings & Great Pain – Ch. 6, Christmas Future
We all know someone who does it. We may even have been guilty of it ourselves. I call it the “I had a dream” speech. It usually goes something like this: Oh my God! I had the weirdest dream last night. It was so freaky, but it felt really real. I was wearing roller-skates, and I was trying to skate down the hall of the place I used to work, but the carpet was really thick so I couldn’t, and then my mom showed up, but she wasn’t really my mom… and she was only wearing underwear, and speaking some…
Bird of the Week – Common Redpoll
The very Common Redpoll, WC gets counts in the hundreds at his feeders. Still, the males, with the reddish wash on their chest, bring a bit of color to an Interior Alaska winter. The winter of 2013-2014 has already been a tough one for Redpolls. Their primary winter food is birch mast, the seeds of the Alaska Paper Birch. The windstorms devastated the birch mast, so food supplies are short. And it takes a lot of food to keep these little guys moving at sub-arctic temperatures. Happily, they are enthusiastic breeders, double- and sometimes triple-clutchng each summers. For more bird photos, please…
Good Tidings & Great Pain – Ch. 5, You are Bad
It’s still Christmas. 9 Ladies Dancing Day. I still have a few days to finish blogging Sarah Palin’s book. I took a little intermission, but the 12 drummers loom, and it’s time to git ‘er done. The title of Chapter 5 is “Bad News, Good News.” The last three words are unnecessary. The chapter begins with an inspirational quote. “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” ~Martin Luther King, Jr. This particular quote is taken from his famous “I have a dream” speech in 1963. Because when Dr….
Mudflats’ Top 13 of 2013
Since it’s two millennia plus a baker’s dozen on the calendar, we thought that it seemed appropriate to give a nod to the top 13 Mudflats stories of 2013. We noticed that six of the top 13 posts are about a certain former half governor who used to steer Alaska’s ship of state. We’re not quite sure what to make of this. We’re not ones to pat ourselves on the back, but that option is less horrifying to us than thinking that Sarah Palin is still all that important. We prefer instead to believe that she has simply morphed, devolved…
Duck Dynasty Duplicity?
Seems like the boys of Duck Dynasty done forgot where they come from. Usually, that means a feller’s gone and got uppity. In this case, it’s the reverse. Before the inexplicably popular show hit the airwaves, the beard-wearing, camo-doffing, red white & blue waving hillbillies lead a life of shame that they choose to forget, but because of photography, and the internets, past sins live on in perpetuity. Let’s take Jep. Here’s the prince of redneck reality TV in what you thought was his natural swampy habitat. Turns out, just one eight inch beard ago things were different. Remove the…
Time Flies
I’m not sure why 2013 seemed to fly by. I’ve always heard “the older you get …,” but this year seemed to go faster than some months in 2012. Some years it’s better to close the chapter and start writing the next but indulge me for a minute of retrospection. One year, while I was home from university, mother asked my sisters and me what we had resolved for the New Year. I said my resolution was to say whatever I thought, to not keep my opinions to myself. Mom shuddered. My sisters laughed. I was just aiming for something…
Palin’s Book & My Xmas Pilgrimage to Wasilla
Christmas Eve was a bitter night. Despite my best efforts, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. I was not going to make it through blogging all of Sarah Palin’s Christmas book, Good Tidings and Great Joy, before the big day. There just wasn’t enough eggnog in the world to keep up the pace. I had debated at one point handling this predicament like that children’s hide-and-seek trick, where they’re supposed to count to a hundred before they come find you. “One, two, skip a few, ninety-nine, one hundred!” Chapter 1, almost done, skip the crap, I’m fin-ished! But I…
Bird of the Week – Pine Grosbeak
A bright color in our monochromatic winter, and a truly lovely song besides, the Pine Grosbeak is a favorite winter bird. The females and immature birds are grey with a goldish wash across their crown and nape. They are wary and not present every winter or all winter. You will hear them much more often than you will see them, but they are a treat on a grey winter day. For more bird photos, please visit Frozen Feather Images.