Utah Vacation — Day One

Posted on October 20, 2018 by Roger

It’s been a long time since we just took off for an extended vacation. When we decided to do it this year, Sally couldn’t get off work until the last week of October. That was later in the season than we wanted to go, but it helped us decide to head for Utah and not Wyoming.

It all worked out. We thought we’d be traveling in early winter, but once we got west of the Rockies, we found ourselves in the peak of fall color season. (More on that in future posts.)

We left home at 9:00 a.m. — our goal on this trip was to see a lot but not be rushed. I took I-70 all the way across Colorado. We’d never been on it between Frisco and Glenwood Springs, so this was our first trip past Vail and through Glenwood Canyon.

Our only sightseeing along the way was a on a brief stop in Fruita to see the statue of Mike, the headless chicken.

In 1945, a local farmer named Lloyd Olsen cut the head off a rooster. The bird ran around like, well … a chicken with its head cut off. But it didn’t stop running. Apparently, enough of the brain was still attached to the spine to keep it functioning after a fashion. “Mike” could walk around and stand on a perch, and even attempted to preen, pick at the ground, and crow. The farmer fed it with an eyedropper and small bits of corn.

Lloyd took the chicken on the road to fairs and sideshows. Mike even appeared in Time and Life magazines.  At the height of his fame, he was bringing in what would be $50,000/month today. It all came to an end when the rooster choked on a piece of grain.

Fruita holds an annual Mike the Headless Chicken Day, and this statue stands proudly downtown.

We left Fruita and soon entered a very bleak section of Utah. My wife said the landscape looked like an elephant had melted, which I thought was quite descriptive.

I’d reserved a room in the River Terrace Hotel in Green River, the only community with any claim to the description “town” in that part of the state. Green River isn’t a fancy place, and in other parts of the world, our hotel wouldn’t be considered a fancy hotel. But in that town, it was as good as it gets. Our room overlooked the river. It was clean, and the chairs were comfortable. The bed, as we learned later, was not.

My wife settled in to relax and enjoy the view. I walked across the street to the John Wesley Powell River History Museum. I’d read, and enjoyed, Powell’s account of boating through the Grand Canyon, and there certainly wasn’t anything else to do in town.

It cost me $6 to get in, and I spent maybe a half hour. It was well done, but only about half of it had to do with Powell’s voyages. The remainder was a hall of fame of guides and others who had something to do with the river. That part was of little interest.

The location of the town is the only spot where the river can be easily crossed. It was the location of a ford, a ferry, and now, a bridge.

It was still fairly early in the evening. I saw that there was a state park just downstream from our hotel, so I grabbed my binoculars to do my first Utah birding. The park turned out to be a tiny slice of river taken up entirely by a golf course and a camp ground. I didn’t bother.

So it was back to the hotel, having exhausted the recreational activities of the town. We debated where to go for supper. There weren’t many options, and we quickly narrowed these down to two — a taco truck and the Tamarisk Restaurant. We decided on the truck and arrived to discover it was closed — even though the web site and the sign said it would be open until 10:00 p.m. So it was the Tamarisk, which was associated with our hotel and located next door.

It was an odd place, with a fancy 1960’s vibe inside but with large photo murals of the local landscape on the walls. The booths along the large picture window overlooking the river were all taken, so the hostess sat us at a table for 10 in the middle of the room. For reasons I can’t recall, I ordered beef fajitas. They were edible, but nothing to sing about. The server was friendly, the kid from the booth behind me dropped his napkin in my lap, and the price was high.

We retired to an evening of reading in our room and a night of restlessness on the hard and lumpy slab that served as our mattress. For $160, it wasn’t a place of dreams.

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Glow at the Gardens

Posted on October 18, 2018 by Roger

I had barely mentioned this pumpkin-carving festival at the Denver Botanical Gardens when my wife told me to buy tickets. Our only option was a Thursday night. We drove up after work and ate supper at Noodles. The park was crowded with a lot of families with kids, but there were a couple other older couples beside us.

The ads for the event bragged on the “professional” artists who carved the pumpkins. But apart from five or six “statues,” there wasn’t much I couldn’t have done. What they lacked in artistry, they made up for in sheer volume — and a lot of lights.

We were there for perhaps an hour and saw everything there was to see. I’ll let the photos tell most of the rest of the story.

This glass sculpture sits out all the time — it was there when we visited to see the Christmas lights two years ago. I can’t help wondering what they do when it hails.

This was probably the most impressive of the statues.

This owl looks impressive, but it isn’t really carved so much as it’s just pumpkin slices fixed onto a frame and backlit.

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Paravicini’s Italian Bistro

Posted on October 16, 2018 by Roger

We may have a new favorite restaurant. We decided to try something new, so we ended up at this Italian restaurant in Old Colorado City.

It’s an intimate little place with an inner-city vibe and a pleasant ambiance. I ordered the Fettuccini Gabriella, with shrimp and scallops, and it was delicious. I don’t remember what my wife got, but she loved it. The bread and salad were also tasty.

People who walked in when we did were told there was an hour wait, but I’d made reservations, so we were seated right away. It was featured on Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives, and there are a ton of good reviews on Yelp.

We will be back.

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Everything There Is to Do in Pueblo

Posted on October 13, 2018 by Roger

Saturday promised to be pleasant, so I decided to head to Pueblo and see what there was to see. My first stop was the El Pueblo History Museum. I expected a history of the city and the area. What I got was a dedicated attempt to make me feel guilty for being white. (It didn’t work.)

One room had an art exhibit filled with pieces depicting the mistreatment of the Hispanic population. Another room had museum-displays telling pretty much the same story. The third room had a display on the Ludlow Massacre, with emphasis on how badly we should feel about the children.

I firmly believe that we should know and learn from history. But this museum was decidedly one-sided in its perspective. There was a central court with a few generic displays. My favorite was this slice from an old cottonwood tree that featured three (3!) signs with three different stories about how many — if any — people were hanged from its branches.

This cannon was used in the Glorieta Pass Civil War battle in New Mexico.

I saw everything there was to see in about half an hour.

I was only a couple blocks from the Pueblo Riverwalk. The season was over, so none of the boats or fountains were working, but it was a pleasant walk. The “river” is the old bed of the Arkansas. After a flood in 1921, the river was rerouted into a levy away from downtown. But when they built the riverwalk, some of the water was directed back into the old channel. There were restaurants along the paths, but it was early in the day, so only a few people were out and about.

A very short stretch of the channel runs through a “natural area.” A sign explained about beavers, but I was still very surprised a few minutes later to actually see one eating a stick — right there in the middle of the city. It paid no attention to me as I took photos from 12 feet away.

I walked the entire riverwalk, which, with bridges and all, makes a loop of about a mile.

From there, I drove to the south end of the city to the Steelworks Center of the West. I had this museum entirely to myself except for the woman who took my money and then disappeared into an office to cough and blow her nose. Because of all the coal in the area, Pueblo was a major production center for steel, mostly for railroads. The museum is in the old medical dispensary building. Half of it tells the story of the steel mills. The other half contains displays of 1930s medical equipment. It’s a bit of an odd mix. It was well done for a small museum — I suspect it’s sponsored by the company that now runs the mill. (They do mostly recycling there now, I think.) I would have enjoyed it more if it better explained the process of making steel. It cost me $6 to get in, and I think I was there maybe a half hour.

The mills across I-25.

My next stop was the Pueblo Zoo. I didn’t expect much, but this turned out to be the highlight of the day. It wasn’t large or fancy, but it doesn’t pretend to be. Many of the cages and buildings are leftovers from a WPA project during the Depression, so there’s a decided retro vibe. There aren’t many large animals — a couple lions, a couple zebras and camels, some buffalo. an elk that was lying in a mud puddle. But I will say this — a higher percentage of the animals were out and about than in any other zoo I can remember visiting.

There weren’t many people there, so I had many of the animals to myself. I took my time and saw everything and was there maybe an hour and a half. It was the one thing I did in Pueblo that I’d be interested in doing again.

I stopped at the Nature and Raptor Center, paid $5 to park in a rutted dirt lot, and saw about 12 hawks and owls in ratty cages. Definitely not worth the visit.

On my way out of town, I went to Barnes & Noble and bought a jigsaw puzzle and a pretzel.

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Bird #504 — Parasitic Jaeger

Posted on September 11, 2018 by Roger

stercorarius (of dung, a reference to the skuas’ pursuit of other seabirds until they disgorge their food, the disgorged food once thought to be excrement) parasiticus (parasitic)

Tuesday, September 11, 2018 — 5:58 pm

Chatfield State Park, Colorado

Eighteen years ago, a Long-tailed Jaeger made an appearance in central Illinois. I drove four hours down and four hours back to see it.

Over the past few days, two of them have been seen regularly, along with a Parasitic Jaeger, at Chatfield Reservoir. As a Sabine’s Gull was also being seen there, that made two potential lifers and a second-ever sighting. I took off work an hour early and headed up.

Chatfield Reservoir is a large man-made lake created to supply Denver with water. It’s shaped like an upside-down “J” with the larger arm to the west. I had no idea where to look for the birds. I walked along the large peninsula that splits the lake, scanning constantly for large, dark gull-like birds. I found the Sabine’s Gull (previous post), but I  saw nothing that looked at all like a jaeger. I made my way back past the south boat ramp,to a narrow spit that cuts out into the lake. I still wasn’t seeing anything, and had just about determined to call it a day when another birder wandered up.

The first thing he said was that a Merlin was on the other side of a tree 25 feet away from me. I had never seen a Merlin in Colorado, or anywhere else for a long time, so this was good news. But I played it cool and casually wandered to where I could see it and get some photos.

A few minutes later, Frank (we introduced ourselves at some point) spotted the jaegers flying low over the water on the far side of the reservoir.  For the next half hour, I watched them flying back and forth across the face of the dam. They never came close to where I was standing. The birds were very close in color to the rocks on the dam wall, so they often disappeared. And then, suddenly, I’d find them again. They landed and swam from time to time, but a lot of the time they were chasing gulls, presumably to steal fish from them.

Because that’s what jaegers do. They are essentially the hawks of the sea. I saw one flying  in full-out in pursuit of a gull, and it caught the slower bird in no time flat. Sometimes, one of the smaller jaegers chased the larger one.

Which brings me to the issue of identification. This gets a little tricky. All three birds were immatures, so none of them had the distinctive tail feathers of adults. They were obviously jaegers, darker than the gulls, with flashing white patches on their primaries. Their buoyant, aggressive flight and behavior of chasing gulls is also typical of jaegers.

Two of them were smaller and slighter, with pale heads. These were the Long-tailed Jaegers. The third bird was much darker, with an almost black head and dark brown body that seemed, from a distance. to have some cinnamon tones in the good, late-afternoon light.

As I looked, Frank described the field marks of the two species. I couldn’t see much of what he was talking about, but I could see that the darker bird was just a little bit bulkier and larger than the smaller ones. The difference was apparent when they were swimming next to each other or when they were soaring and banking at the same time.

So how do I rule out Pomarine Jaeger, the third species which looks very much like the Parasitic in immature plumage? How do I justify adding Parasitic to my list when I only saw it at a great distance? Frank had been out in a boat with other birders the day before. He had close-up photos and was showing these to me on his phone as we watched. The deciding factor for me was the comparative sizes:

Long-tailed — length 15″, wingspan 38″
Parasitic — length 16.5″, wingspan 42″
Pomarine — 18.5″, wingspan 48″

The dark jaeger I saw was a little larger, but certainly not 10-inches of wingspan larger, than the smaller birds. I know that isn’t much to go on, and I hope to get back up there this weekend and get a better view. But Frank confirmed everything I was seeing.

I took a little bit of video as the Parasitic Jaeger floated on the water and then took off. It was a very long way away, so these photos from the video show nothing more than a vaguely gull-like bird with dark plumage and white patches on its primaries.

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