An American Birding Expo to Remember

I've never had a month fly by so fast. I got home from South Africa on September 9 and had to blast off, hit the ground running, with the afterburners on. I'd worked very hard before leaving to get all my stuff ready to show at the American Birding Expo in Columbus. Good thing, because that started Sept. 15. No time for jet lag. Just get to it. Bill and his team at Bird Watcher's Digest had spent much of the last year organizing this enormous event for vendors and birders alike. 

I loaded up the Subaru and took it to Columbus on a fine Thursday afternoon. As I was walking back and forth loading it, I found two apports on the sidewalk. I had a feeling something momentous would happen there, and these feathers solidified that feeling. Blue jay secondary is fairly common, but who finds cedar waxwing tail feathers? Since then, Liam has found two tiny wing feathers complete with red wax tips in the same place. 

Maybe it was just a fare-thee-well; maybe it was a heads up. Whatever it was, I received it with gratitude.

I took the backroads, for one more visual roll in the September joy-hay before I would spend the weekend indoors. I took this beautiful copper-penny shiny red horse on my way there as a good omen. I like the way his tail mimics the mare's tails in the sky. I could stare at this photo forever. 

My friend and guide Mario Cordoba from Costa Rica came to the Expo to promote his tour company, Crescentia Tours. It was lots of fun hanging out with him and introducing him to my friends from all over the States and the world. He had a couch in his booth. We called it Mario's Lounge. Not that either of us did much sitting around at the Expo! It was hoppin'!

With help from Mario and our dear friend Kim, my booth was set up in no time.

Kim, contemplating the best use of space.

 Can you believe all this art and product fit in the back of my Subaru Forester? Well, I'm packing it full again today, headed for the Ohio Volunteer Naturalists' meeting at OSU's Mansfield Campus. Driving up through Amish country, ohh yeah. I'll give a talk Saturday morning, sign and sell books, then drive straight back to Marietta to give the talk again Saturday evening to the second weekend Reader Rendezvous in a row. And Sunday morning, I'll be up at 6 to make and serve lunch to 30 at our place. Last weekend it was 59. I can say I've cooked for 59. That's something my aunts in Iowa thought nothing of and did regularly, but it was kind of a big deal for me. My respect for them only grows.

This is me, back at the Expo, geekin' all the way out between my most excellent friends James Adams, Manager at the Lodge and Spa at Pico Bonito, Honduras, and Mario Cordoba of Crescentia Tours, Costa Rica.  The combined natural history mojo on that couch might have caused spontaneous combustion had we been able to linger. Yes, that's the smile of a cat caught on the Thanksgiving table. A Zick sammitch made of boys!

Speaking of major mojo, my bes fren Shila came up to Columbus to spend the night and take in the Expo at leisure. There was so much to see, and she needed new binoculars. We fixed her up. Swarovski EL's, baby, all the way. That evening, we had some pitbull therapy from Sophie at our wonderful hosts' extremely groovy home. Thank you, Marla and Rufus, thank you. Exactly what Dr. Kim ordered!! Shila and a sweet pittie--my twin cups of hot cocoa with marshmallows.

Nothing will fix you up after a long day like a large, sweet-smelling vanilla fudge chunk of love, demanding a massage. Oh Sophie you're such a tease.

I couldn't resist Sophie. This is the face she made when Rufus gave her a time out for being a little too boisterous. What. Me? Too boisterous??

 Waaah!! Sophie's pouty face makes me laugh every time I see it. 

What's better than that?

Baby kisses, given and received. Sofia is the sweetest, cuddliest, sauciest little 9-month old you ever met. Full of beans, yet up for everything Mama does. Who wouldn't love to be carried around in a sling by Jessica?  Jessica was one of Bird Watcher's Digest's star interns back in college days. She's never forgotten us, and comes to almost all our events, often bringing a baby for me to hold and love on.

This is Jessica, the dark-haired beauty dead center in this photo from our June 2015 North Bend Reader Rendezvous. She's locked onto a bird and by God she's going to get a look at it, and show it to everyone else while she's at it. Such a keen, appreciative, grateful observer and participant in both nature and life.

Jess's eldest, Isabella, takes after her mother. She's keeping a nature journal, sketching mushrooms. Ohhh. Keep looking down, Isabella, keep noticing, don't ever stop. Maybe one day it'll be your job, too.

Babies like these and young mothers like Jessica give you faith in this crazy, upside-down, looking-glass world. The wonder and joy and interest in their eyes lights up everything and everyone around them.

In the three Expo tents on the grounds of Grange Insurance Audubon Center in Columbus, it was heating up. A stark contrast to last year, when horizontal rain and temperatures in the 50's failed to stop enormous crowds from convening.

Expo organizer, Grand Poobah and Iceman cometh--Bill Thompson III and his staff took excellent care of the exhibitors!

Christine from Oregonia Ohio with her pile of Zickloot. Far and away the winner for bulk sales. I was grateful and delighted to play Santa for her! And behind her, another happy customer buying a recycled feedsack shopping bag. I finally found a crowd that "got" them.

The American Birding Expo was fabulous. Most people there were in a buying mood, whether it be optics, birding gear or Zickabilia. Tour operators from perhaps 35 countries touted the virtues of birding in their homelands. It was an eclectic and international crowd, and I was proud to have a booth there. 

A Sachem plys a zinnia in the totally rockin' GIAC butterfly garden. Thank you, Columbus Audubon, for allowing Bird Watcher's Digest to host this amazing vendor mart in your beautiful spaces. And thanks to everyone who supported Indigo Hill Arts!

Make a Summer Quiche

Certain foods go with certain seasons, and when the late-summer garden is bursting with cherry tomatoes and sweet peppers, it's time to make a summer quiche.

I like making quiche because it's never the same dish twice. And I love cooking with produce I've grown meself. 

Things I don't grow meself: Pie crusts. I use Pillsbury's rolled up ones, even though I swear they shrink them every time I buy them. Barely enough dough these days to pinch a tiny frill on the edge. Pfft!  Think we wouldn't notice, Doughboy? 

Put a fresh crust in your favorite pie pan, then get to sauteeing! 

Those little sweet snack peppers that come in a zip-top bag at the grocery store are true to seed. I figured that out about four years ago when I took a leap of faith and planted some seeds from the grocery-store ones, and got darling little sweet snack peppers in my own garden. Pick or get a bunch of those and chop 'em up. Add some minced poblanos (green) for heat and color. Sautee up with chopped onions in a blob of butter until they're tender, and the onions are clear.  Set aside.

Toss some chopped Sungold cherry tomatoes in the pan. Cooking with Sungolds is wonderful. They're like little flavor bombs, bringing intense, rich, sunny tomato flavor to anything you make, be it quiche or stir-fry, scrambled eggs or soup. I miss them so when frost comes!

In tonight's quiche, I added tomatillos. One brave tomatillo volunteered this year, right where last year's plants had been. Despite the severe drought, that one plant has made dozens of fruit, small but tangy, which are begging to be used wherever cherry tomatoes are used.

The fabulous tomatillo/Sungold slurry:

With onions and peppers...

Moosh 'em down with a potato masher and you have a flavor-packed base and binder for your quiche. These somewhat unexpected ingredients are what make this a Summer Quiche.  Put that slurry in your unbaked pie crust.

Add generous handfuls of whatever cheese you have on hand. Sharp cheddar, mild cheddar, Monterey Jack, Asiago, even a smattering of feta! All cheese is nom. Mixtures are nom nom.

If you wish, toss in some fresh spinach. It'll cook down in no time. And then you can call it Quiche Florentine, which sounds so nice.

Over it all, pour a mixture of 2 cups whole milk (a bit of half and half won't hurt, either) and 3 eggs, beaten well together.

Salt lightly, and season with fresh herbs from the garden. I like to use rosemary, sage and thyme. Grind a little fresh nutmeg into the liquid pie and slip it into a preheated 400 degree oven. After 10 minutes, cut the heat to 325 and bake until golden brown on top (about 50 min. total).  You're supposed to serve quiche lukewarm. It slices better then. We usually can't wait.

Touch the top lightly, make sure it doesn't jiggle too much. It'll set up more when it's cooler. 

Yep, the clock says 10:22 pm, but I wanted to make a quiche for the morning, to say goodbye to my dear friend Mario Cordoba, who has been visiting from Costa Rica. It's been a joy to have him here taking in all my favorite places, getting to know my little family. If food be love, and I think it is, he's been well-loved.

How lucky can you get, to be able to show your friend your favorite places, to see them through his wondering eyes?

 Ahh, I miss him already. But I'll see him in February, when we take another lucky band of 12 sojourners on a natural history romp through Costa Rica.  That ought to take the bite out of winter.

**Alert readers will notice that there are a bunch of different ingredients going down here, and no spinach in the final quiche. These photos are from several different Summer Quiches. Really, this post is just meant to encourage home cooks to branch out and throw a bunch of different stuff in your quiches, to see what happens. Cherry tomatoes and tomatillos are the only real twist here. Quiches can be anything you want them to be. I've had a Village Bakery quiche stuffed with carrots and beets and it was delicious! So toss the recipe out and have fun!

Macaw Messiah

I am delighted to say that, in February, I will be returning with a group of about 15 people to Costa Rica. Guiding trips is a brand new thing for me, but I find it suits me pretty well. Why wouldn't it? I guess it's obvious that I love showing people amazing places and creatures.

 It helps to work with Holbrook Travel, which owns a lodge (Selva Verde) along the Pacific coast, and specializes in thoughtful, sustainable eco-tourism worldwide. I respect and like the people I work with very much, and our Costa Rican guide, Mario Cordoba, is the bomb. He's promised to work some more bats into this trip. Squeeee!!

After last winter's trip, I did several posts about Don Alvaro's macaw and wildlife sanctuary on his finca not far from Holbrook Travel's proprietary lodge, Selva Verde. And you, gentle readers, surprised me yet again by asking where and how you could donate money to help him keep these magnificent birds in the manner to which they have become accustomed. I didn't have an answer for you then. Still don't have proper contact information for Don Alvaro. But I'm headed back there in February 2015, and I would be delighted to bring along a gift from you. (Probably ought to have donations in by Feb. 19 at the latest). A recap:

This is not an ordinary man-and-macaw story. The afternoon we visited Don Alvaro's finca in the rolling countryside near the Rio Sarapiqui was one of the most magical and moving of our trip.

This gentle man rescues macaws. Caged, lonely, abused macaws, macaws coming from all over. I saw one with only half a beak, and one that, in its misery in solitary confinement, had plucked itself all the way to fuzzy gray down. Don Alvaro has 19 in all. That's a LOT of macaws. (Just having one around frequently got on my last nerve). But "has" isn't quite the right verb here. 

Because it's what he does with them, how he keeps them that moved me so. These birds are free, flying all over the farm. Flying many kilometers up and down the river, voicing harsh shrieks that, in their harshness, still sound joyful.

Ruckus on the finca! RAAAAWWWK!!!

Great green and scarlet macaws, free flying in the riverine gallery forest, which connects directly to the enormous and well-studied La Selva Bioreserve.

Shots of scarlet and electric blue arrow overhead

But they come back to Don Alvaro for peanuts and a little loving. 

Having lived with a captive chestnut-fronted macaw for 23 years, I could immediately see that this was a much, much better way. Perhaps the only way to "keep" any parrot. Free.

I embrace this concept so fully that I had tears rolling down my cheeks for much of the visit, just watching these birds living as they were meant to live. Well, panhandling peanuts isn't quite their natural state, but it's a lot closer than moping on a T-stand,  wings clipped, in somebody's dark living room or den.

Macaws are widely perceived as so valuable that very few people would dare to release them into the garden, much less the sky.

But Don Alvaro relies on their native intelligence and their attachment to the only home they know. And he hopes they will breed, make more macaws, perhaps in time even repopulate some of the area, perhaps La Selva Biological Reserve, which after all isn't too far away.

As a trained observer can see, one pair has already bred. A great green macaw paired with a scarlet, making some lovely hybrid babies--four in one clutch!

You can't tell someone whom to love.  Mama and Papa, likely the birds to the right in the photo below. Great green x scarlet macaw gives you three sunny rainbow babies. And two full-blooded scarlets to the left. So it can happen, and these birds can multiply in this setting.

Even though this pairing was a bio-misfire, it was encouraging to see that macaws could so successfully breed. I hoped hard that some same-species pairs would follow suit. Don Alvaro has huge nest boxes in the trees around the place, also hoping. The world desperately needs more macaws. Everywhere they once were, they are disappearing.

I've seen so many macaws languishing in iron cages, sitting still and mopey, their colors and eyes dull with boredom. Seeing them swooping and bickering and yelling here, their feathers smooth and in jewel-toned perfection, was a tonic I sorely needed. 

Oh, they were saucy and loud. Yet their screams fit this vibrant place, were part of its music. They dissipated into the open sky. Having to hear macaws screaming indoors is nothing but painful. Even if they weren't as intelligent as a two-year-old human, their screams alone should rule them out as appropriate pets. But outdoors? 

 It's music, parrot punk. Macaw emo.

These macaws have found a friend, someone who understands and trusts them.

Who believes in them enough to set them free.

Though he has very little English, and his Spanish was far too rapid for me to understand, Don Alvaro's kindness and love permeates this place. Just being there with him among the birds, all of them rapidly switching places and flapping from tree to tree, changed me forever.

I believe that this is the only way for macaws to live--together, full-flighted, and free.

 If you agree, please consider a small gift for Don Alvaro, that he may continue to provide a beautiful life for these incredible, but so often abused higher beings.

See the DONATE button on the right sidebar of this blog. In the comment box, be sure to specify that it's for the macaws. Thank you so much. I'll take your gift to him (LUCKY ME!!), and I'll be sure to post pictures from our 2015 visit. With your help, I think I'll be able to get a smile out of him this year.  :D

¿Quién es esta mujer, y porqué ella está llorando?

Red-eyed Tree Frogs!

It's the iconic rainforest critter, on every cereal box, every kids' book, every poster on every schoolroom wall. The red-eyed tree frog Agalychnis callidryas has it all--color, pizazz. Thanks to all this exposure, it's possibly the most charismatic and recognizable of all frogs. But I'd never seen one. Never even hoped to see one. Imagine my delight when our guide Mario Cordoba told me that a little cement pond at Selva Verde, Holbrook Travel's lodge in Sarapiqui in the Caribbean lowlands, was full of them. Calling, mating. Oh my gosh. This has to be the jazziest frog of all.

Darkness fell and Mario fixed his flashlight on a frog for me. I almost swallered my tongue, as we say here in Appalachia. Oh my gosh!! I couldn't believe I was seeing this.

But how to photograph them in the black night without a flash? Well, you prefocus, crank the ISO up, and twiddle your dials until you get something nice. You try not to keep the light on the frog for more than a few seconds. You don't want to disrupt their business. These photos are all hand-held--given the low light I probably should have run a few blocks to my room to get my monopod to steady the camera, but ehh. The frogs were there and so was Mario and so was I. Carpe diem.

This little guy's calling, his throat pooched out. He may also vibrate the stem or leaf he's perched on to attract a female. What's shakin', baby?

He has a friend.

Such intensely decorated creatures, with that electric blue on thighs and neon orange on their feet...but their colors show only at night!

I was really happy with this pose. Right off a poster.

Ready for a surprise? Here's a red-eyed tree frog, sleeping during the day. Mario had to tell me it was the same species when I found it. Frogs are so darn cool. How do you switch those colors off like that?

Chromatophores, that's how--special skin cells that can show or hide brilliant color in an instant. Last night: dressed for the gala. Now he looks like a dead leaf. 

Also calling: Rain frogs. Sweet little things in their own right. What a treat to see such creatures calling, doing their froggy things. What a privilege.

This second night's try at photographing them worked out even better. Mario coached me on exposure, and through trial and error we found that shutting the F-stop down a click or two and boosting the ISO a bit allowed the frogs' colors to glow. The trick is not to wash them out with too much light. That's better for the frogs, too. 

We want them to keep doing things like this. If you click on this photo, you may see the really cool Venetian blind pattern on the male's nictitating eye membrane. The female will eventually lay a cluster of eggs on a leaf overhanging water. These will hatch about a week later, the tadpoles falling into the pool, where they complete their metamorphosis. Tiny juveniles often hang out in the water wells of aerial bromeliads, preying on small insects. 

I think this is my favorite of the shots. I maneuvered around to get it all in the same frame.  What looks like the full moon rising is actually a light fixture in the open-air bar behind the little pool. No, I'm not crouched in the rainforest risking a bite by a fer-de-lance. I'm hanging out with Mario, talking light and frogs, by a little water garden at a jungle lodge, loving every minute of it. Holbrook Travel built it, and the tree frogs came.

Costa Rica well deserves its reputation as an ultimate ecotourism destination. Everywhere we went, we felt at home with our binoculars, cameras and spotting scope. Tiny home-cooking restaurants in the mountains are festooned with hummingbird feeders and buzzed by incredibly arrayed birds (just you wait!!) Tanagers flit to bananas and rice laid out for them. It's so different from the vast majority of American restaurants, where the whole focus seems to be to get you inside and wall you off from nature. (When you go to a Bob Evans, I'm the one who raised the blinds and opened the shutters and left them that way). The Alajuelo airport itself is given over to images of toucans and quetzals. Costa Rica knows where its riches lie. 

all photos taken with my Canon 7D with 70-300 IS L telephoto lens

and the expert tutelage of guide Mario Cordoba