IN-KS Biking & Birding Days 1-3
I am currently on a 10 day trip that will take me through Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. This is a combination birding and biking trip. Last Friday, I flew into Indianapolis with my bike, rented a car, and headed to Terra Haute to cycle and bird. The photo above is of a quiet gravel road between birding locations outside of Terre Haute.
On the drive from Indianapolis to Terre Haute, I stopped by Lieber State Recreation Area to do some birding. It almost felt as if I saw more species of wildlife than bird. Walking along, I almost stumbled across this 3 foot long snake next to a path that I was walking on.
Despite the paucity of birds, the scenery was nice.
This White-breasted Nuthatch photo was the only bird photo that I bothered to keep from that walk.
After checking into my hotel in Terre Haute, I reassembled my bike then took a 25 mile bike ride stopping in a variety of birding locations. This is a pair of Wilson Snipes I noticed at a pond beside the road.
Indiana is the 42nd state in which I have cycled. This trip, I will pick up 3 new states, Indiana, Arkansas, and Kansas getting me to 44 states ridden and 6 to go. My remaining 6 states will be Nevada, Wyoming, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska. Above is a photograph as I cycled back towards my hotel.
Besides trying to cycle in all 50 states, I also have a long term goal of seeing 50 species of birds in all 50 states. At the start of the trip, I only had 15 states with at least 50 species of birds. While Friday had not been a great day for bird photographs, I discovered that I had managed to see 46 bird species in Indiana. So before I started driving to my day’s cycling location in Illinois, I went back to a park I had been the previous day to try and find 4 more bird species. One of the first birds I saw when I arrived was this American White Pelican.
After about an hour of wandering around, I finally spotted this Belted Kingfisher for species number 50 in Indiana. For essentially all of my life, I have been very goal oriented and competitive. I am striving to temper these characteristics as I get older; however, I also realize that I am unlikely to radically change at my age. I see my birding and biking goals as a middle ground, using characteristics that have been central to achievement my professional career to help push me to do things that I want to do personally. In this case, travel, bike and bird. Having the goals helps me spend time outdoors in new places doing activities I enjoy that nurture me.
Next, I drove to Carlyle Lake in Illinois. When I arrived, there were very few birds over the lake itself. I saw one Great Blue Heron flying in the distance. There were also a couple of Bonaparte’s Gulls such as this one.
In the park where I started, there were wetlands which is usually good habitat to find a variety of small birds.
Many of the birds I saw were in the trees making it very hard to take interesting photograph. This Blue-gray Gnatcatcher was constantly zipping from branch to branch. I think it stayed on this branch for perhaps 1 or 2 seconds before zipping back into the interior of the tree.
Most of the day was lovely for cycling. This is the causeway at the end of Lake Carlyle shortly after I cycled over the dam. In the late afternoon, I did get caught by a couple of brief showers, but nothing meaningful.
This is later in the afternoon when the sprinkling had just started. These birds are Black-bellied Whistling Ducks. While I did see 53 species throughout the day, my photographs were almost uniformly poor and useful only for verifying species identification in the evening.
After completing my 30 mile ride, I drove a bit west of St. Louis into Missouri for the night. Here is a photo of the sunset behind the hotel.
My third day was spent birding and driving to Bentonville AR. I started by spending 3 hours at the Shaw Nature Reserve. The reserve is over 2400 acres, so 3 hours only allowed me to see a relatively small portion of it. When I first parked, I was greeted by this Palm Warbler sitting on one of the sign posts.
In one of the places I spent time, there were about 20 Red-headed Woodpeckers all around in the tops of the trees. The Red-headed Woodpeckers are my favorite of the woodpeckers in the US. I find their appearance so striking.
Later in the day as I drove to Bentonville, I stopped in a few more places looking for birds. However, the weather was generally rather rainy and windy which tends to make birding both less pleasant and less successful. About the only descent photo I took was of this Purple Martin. I only got this one because it was sitting above its birdhouse.
Today and for the next 4 days, I will be cycling on gravel roads around Bentonville on a trip organized by Trek travel. I try and write a post tomorrow with some photos from today’s and tomorrow’s ride.