Rhubarb, Full Circle

When we last left the Horticulture Chimp, she was grubbing out two baby rhubarb plants from an abandoned farmstead in North Dakota. Ann Hoffert had just seen and heard her life veery, and everyone was happy. Except perhaps the rhubarb plants, which rode to their new home in Ohio in the Chimp's boot, got potted up, yellowed and dropped a couple of leaves and then shrugged and made more. It was mid-June 2011.

The rhubarb went into the Heirloom Bed, where only the most special vegetables and flowers live. It's full of sandy loam and manure, memories and dreams.

The rhubarb liked it there with the asparagus and the spearmint and the old birdbath my dad made out of a disc. Disc, like a disc from a tractor implement. I'd be using it as a birdbath yet but it rusted through, iron being iron. I took it to a welder to fix it but it rusted through again so now it is an odd and not very pretty lawn ornament, unless you knew my dad, and then you'd think it was beautiful.

The rhubarb grew and grew, spreading great flat leaves to the sun, making lovely red stems full of tart flavor.

September rolled around and Ann Hoffert came to visit and attend the Midwest Birding Symposium with her lifelong friend Terry. Who is wearing my binoculars in this photo but don't be confused. I'm a little taller.

I took them for a walk down Dean's Fork (a must-see for Ohio guests)

and Ann Hoffert was so happy to see my habitat, as I am always so happy to see hers

that she hugged us both as we took in the old houses and barns of my favorite dirt road.

I shook her down a pawpaw and showed her tall ironweed

and great lobelia

and an adorable young guy who was checking the oil rigs in a homemade truck made out of plywood, Plexiglas and an ATV

and we went home and I made Ann and Terry the perfect avocado and homegrown lettuce and tomato BLT (I am drooling just looking at this)

and we ate and talked and for dessert

I had finally harvested the rhubarb

and mixed it with fresh September local apples

and covered it with cobbler crumbs cut with almonds and coconut

and butter and vanilla

and baked it (this is before baking; we were too busy eating to take a post-baking picture)

and served it, this rhubarb that had grown beneath the singing veery, Ann's life veery;

rhubarb that had come home in a boot from North Dakota and was now growing happily in Ohio, donating stems to a dessert I'd made that was now on a plate in front of our dearest North Dakota friend.

 It's for full-circle moments like that that I live. 

Veeries and Rhubarb

One of our new favorite destinations in North Dakota is the area up near Devil's Lake. Devil's Lake itself has a refuge where you can drive through and see bison lolling in the grass.

The babeh bison are a nice color of orange.

and very sweet.

We saw a light pole in someone's farmyard. They must do a bit of hunting...those are all whitetail antlers. Yow.

and we walked up our favorite road, which is our favorite because it is heavily wooded and you can see things like redstarts and vireos and thrushes and tanagers there. Those are hard birds to get on the prairie!

It was like walking out of North Dakota and into Pennsylvania. So we've learned over the past two years that if we want a nice fat Big Day list, we must hit this one magic road near Devil's Lake.

And on that road there is an abandoned farmstead

with a not-so-very-old house, which is unusual in itself

and just across the road from there is an overgrown place where once upon a time there might have been a garden

and growing in that garden was a beautiful plant in full bloom that looked to me to belong to the dock family (Polygonaceae) and it hit me that this must be rhubarb abloom.

And at the same time we heard a veery sing deep in the woods and Ann Hoffert had never seen a veery so Bill whipped out his iPhone and called that bird right in.

So not only did we have its breezy song sending shivers up our spines; we had the Real Bird Right There for Ann to See.

Which was wonderful. But the Horticulture Chimp was beginning to hyperventilate, because that blooming rhubarb had obviously done it before and dropped a few seeds. There were baby plants at its base. And though the stems were not yet red, there was something very familiar about their leaves. The Horticulture Chimp dropped to her knees. "Ann, is this rhubarb??" She bent over, looked. "Yes, I believe it is."

Well, it wasn't long before the Chimp had a pointed stick and had begun digging doggedly around the root of the giant rhubarb plant, and it became clear that the babies were actually root propagules, which made digging them out that much more interesting and effortful, a little dirtier.

But the HortChimp always gets her plant.

                                                                                        photo by Bill Thompson III

Two, in fact, which she dampened down with water from a bottle, wrapped in plastic bags, and stuffed in her boots for the long flight home to Ohio. Because she had always, always wanted rhubarb in the garden, and North Dakota rhubarb from right under a singing veery would be ever so much more special.

But it gets better...

Kids and Horses

We have been coming to North Dakota for a long time. 

This June will make our tenth summer that we've given ourselves the gift of the prairie. 

I have been sifting through photos, and gathering my favorites from 2011 and a few from years past.

When we first came to North Dakota, Liam was too young to bring along, so he stayed home with GeePop, who simply refused to bother with diapers and in one swell afternoon toilet trained Liam.

This is a few years later. We've found some very sweet horses standing out in a field near Chase Lake, and we've come to pet them.

It was here that I took one of my all-time favorite photos. If there is a horse with a kinder eye, I have not seen it. Phoebe reminds me of a little Raphaelesque madonna.

Fast-forward to 2011. There's something familiar about this scene.

Recognize anyone?

The horses seemed as happy to see us again as we were to see them.

 Only the paint was from the original crew. But oh, it was good to see him again.

If we could have fit the paint into our suitcase and taken him home, we would have.

We are so looking forward to another spring on the prairie. See, 2012 marks the tenth anniversary of the Potholes and Prairies Birding Festival in Carrington, North Dakota.

And we will be taking the kids.

Not leaving them in Fargo, as we threatened to do last June.

 Be good, little children...

North Dakota at its Best

A marsh wren winds out his clattery wooden song. Could his tail be cocked any higher?

An American bittern hauls his neck and legs around the prairie.

Hi guys! I'm finally taking a little time to prep some posts from North Dakota. She showed very well this spring, exchanging bright sunshine and shirtsleeve weather for the horizontal blowing snow she hammered us with last June. Those of you who read this blog know to expect some NoDak posts every year, since Bill and I have been headlining the Potholes and Prairies festival for what? Seven years now? We speak, we sing, we lead trips, we show a lot of people a lot of cool life birds. It's (part of) a living, and loads of fun.

I didn't take many photos this year--we were just too busy getting festivalgoers on birds to do much photography. Just for nice, Bill set me up with the sweetest carbon-fiber tripod for my Swarovski compact scope, so I was totin' that and digging getting people killer looks at life birds. So my photos are kind of a grab-bag which I will more or less successfully attempt to weave into a narrative. Heh. Less successfully, for sure.

We really focused on bringing some North Dakota hospitality and food to the festival goers this spring, in addition to fabulous checkoffs for their life lists (Baird's sparrow, Sprague's pipit, American bittern, yellow rail, black tern, marbled godwit, gray partridge, ferruginous hawk and the like). After searching all day long--Bill's Big Day-- for gray partridge, we found a little covey walking around in a used equipment lot right in Carrington as we packed it in for the day! Gray partridge, like ring-necked pheasant, is a naturalized exotic species in North Dakota, but the birding powers that be hath decreed it a countable species.

Back to cultcha-- one of my trips was called Pipits and Pies. We hit the diners, boy, and I will never forget the rhubarb coffee cake lightly dusted with powdered sugar that we enjoyed in Woodworth. Oh my goodness. It was gone before I could get a picture.

Bill and I have been working on festival organizers for years to abandon the boxed lunches and treat the participants to real North Dakota hospitality. This year, it happened. We ate in the cafe's. No ham sandwiches, no apple, no Otis Spunkmeyer cookie. Real food. After a long morning of birding, there is nothing like a noontime Smorgasbord (referred to simply as a Smorg).

Knoephla soup, roast pork, masheds, salad, and a fluffy grandma-ey concoction of mandarin oranges, coconut, Miracle Whip and Cool Whip. At least that's how I sussed it out. It was more than delicious.

The thing I love about getting in the small-town cafes is that we get to talk to local people, and impress on them that we're all here gobbling up their smorg because they have such fantastic birds and wildlife. They are usually amazed that anyone would travel to their lonely part of the planet to see sparrows. I enjoy soaking in the stares as we troop in, and then announcing loudly, "Look out! The birdwatchers are here! Hide your knoephlas!" After an introduction like that, we wind up talking to them, and explaining what we're all about. Kind of a grassroots eco-tourism approach.

And the food is out of this world.

The Robinson cafe, groaning under the weight of happy birders.

Main Street, Robinson, North Dakota, looking north.

And Main Street, Robinson, looking south, a view that never fails to put a lump in my throat.

These little towns hang on on the wide and heedless prairie.