The Mississinewa battlefield reenactment was this past weekend. Three days' celebration of the extirpation of the Miami Tribes along the Mississinewa and Wabash rivers.

An irony: the staged encampment has the Indians sleeping on the ground in makeshift shelters, hogan-like.

The fact is the US Army slept in tents, in late December, on the ground, while the Miami lived in framed houses with shingled roofs.

Great "reenactment".

Today I took my dogs up to the area. There was a jail workforce out cleaning up. I thought it best to leave.

The drive north was uneventful, until I passed a fifty-foot stretch of wire. Must have been buried cable raised over a drainage ditch. I was paying little attention until an American Kestrel left the wire and flew overhead, looping back to this solitary stretch of wire.

There were six Great Egrets and two Great Blue Herons at Grant Creek. I am always awed by these big, beautiful birds, nearly extinct in the last century.

There is a "wetlands area" a couple miles north that usually held a heron, until the water table dropped with fall. Last evening I was driving by when a young buck, two or three years old, crossed the road into a beanfield. I let Abbe out, but the buck had a forty-yard headstart. The deer leapt through the beans, while Abbe bounced, and I don't know if she made ground, but the deer made corn 200 yards off and Abbe lost everything.

Abbe chases anything that runs, but, when whatever stops, she does too. Game over.

There was a heron in the water, which holds hope for some fish there yet.

We were walking a closed road at the reservoir (Old Slocum Trail, closed since 1955) when I heard a red tail, but there was too much foliage to find it. Nice to know it was about.

Again, the distinction between birdwatching and "birding". Birdwatching, at best, is observing and studying birds. "Birding" is checking off a list, whether an annual list or a life list, identification either visual or aural, and is more a game than an appreciation of birds.

Kenn Kaufman, who set an annual bird count record (since eclipsed), chronicled in "Kingbird Highway", a very readable book, makes this point with eloquence, and backed it up by becoming an expert on identification and behavior, with excellent publications that prove his dedication.

Birds are thinning significantly as the weather cools. There may be a migration of warblers, but I can't help you with finding these most wonderful songbirds.

But there are most cool birds everywhere (see six egrets, above). I apologize for not knowing the status of the Sandhill Cranes at Jasper-Pulaski SF&WA.

A few years ago I was hiking (well, I don't hike, really) the Seeney National Wildlife Refuge in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Across a small lake, in the morning mists, I saw these great big birds begin to emerge. I thought I had discovered them. They were Sandhills, in the shallows near the far shore. They began making noise, the most prehistoric sounds, and I was in love.

Still am.

I'm not too happy about the "harvest" photo, which I found while searching for 'public domain' adornment for my most humble efforts. Shit. You can kill a Sandhill Crane with a slingshot.

Will research this a bit soon to try to establish WTF.