Day 4 for the trip consisted of a short game float in the morning followed by by early brunch and then checking out of the Pangolin Lodge and going to the airport for the flight to the bush…so part 1 will cover that morning.

The weather here in SW FL is starting to get really nice. It’s been cool enough the past week to be open at least the morning and we’ve been closing up and going back to the A/C sometime in the afternoon depending on humidity, temps, and breeze direction…it won’t be long now until we can essentially be open until spring unless it’s going to rain or we have one of our wintry days where it gets cold enough to necessitate closing. 

Connie is starting to improve from her radiation treatments…she ended up with essentially a bad case of sunburn from it on her upper right chest with a bunch of small blisters. The overall skin redness is diminishing but the blisters are still about the same…the PA down at the radiation place said it would be a couple weeks (starting last Monday) before they were healed. She’s putting some prescription ointment on it twice a day and some Benadryl cream in between to help with the itching…and she and a couple of her friends at the Ladies of Elks meeting this week were comparing her burns to what they had, one said it was worse than hers and one about the same. 

Neil’s dropping his bike off tomorrow for a tuneup/lube and chain/sprocket replacement. It’s about 2 years old and has about 4,100 miles on it so he’s pretty sure the chain has stretched more than is advisable and while the rear sprocket doesn’t look too bad it needs replacement whenever the chain is replaced. 

There’s no progress on the government shutdown…both parties continue to demonstrate massive levels of cranium-rectum insertion and both parties continue to lie about what the other side wants and what their side wants. Frankly they’re all just partisan hacks at this point. Neil saw a quote from Stephen A. Smith…who is a leftie but is apparently being threatened with cancellation by the far left for some recent remarks. His sin…he was discussing Representative Jasmine Crocket who is a left wing congresswoman from Texas. He pointed out that while she has a great resume and is well qualified for office…she’s doing nothing but complaining and in his opinion needs to reach across the aisle and negotiate with the other side. We’ve been saying the same thing at our house for years now but compromise has become an extinct concept. Both sides have assumed a “my way or the highway” attitude at this point…which is just a damned shame.

As you can tell…there’s really not much going on here at the moment so let’s get into the boat ride.

The launch point for each of the boat rides here was about 5 miles SW of the lodge and about 4 miles downriver there is a section of it nicknamed The Race…it’s a spot where the river is narrower and shallower than average and has a bunch of small islands and rocks sticking up so the current there is more than at wider/deeper places, hence most of the photo boats don’t go there. The advantage of the islands is that they make a great rookery area for birds and with them flying to and fro to get either nesting materials or bring back food for the offspring results in a lot of bird in flight opportunities…so that’s what they went to do. It’s a great place to practice your panning technique as the long lenses just have a field of view of 4 or 5 degrees so keeping the bird in the frame without clipping the wings takes some practice. They arrived basically before dawn and drifted among the islands for a couple of hours.

Early on…there was simply no light to be had and getting a shutter speed high enough to stop motion meant insanely high ISO numbers which makes for noisy photos so early on they went the other way and went with slow shutter speeds…Neil found 1/20 of a second to be optimum…and getting a more artsy image. The trick I to keep the bird sharp enough to be recognized but allow blurred wings in motion and background because the light is what it is.

African Spoonbill, Neil thought this one turned out pretty well.

Unfortunately…of the half dozen or so fly-bys that he had an opportunity before the sun came up this was the only decent shot. But the light improves very rapidly once the sun is over the horizon, the shot below was just 10 minutes or so later than the one above.

Green Heron locally but more precisely a Striated Heron according to Merlin BirdID.

Super nice light on this one…Neil especially likes the glow through the wings of the light coming in from the right.

Yellow Billed Stork…I wonder how they came up with that name.

Male Darter

Yellow Billed with nesting material…I’m not going to keep repeating the species if it’s something already identified in the post.

Water Thick-Knee…you can’t tell very well from this shot but they have really large knee joints compared to the diameter of the leg, hence the name I guess.

Cormorant

Another Green Heron

Launching (same individual in both shots)

African Spoonbill

Fish Eagle…very similar to our Bald Eagle

And with that the morning was done so we headed back to the dock, then the lodge for brunch/checkout, and then the airport for our flight on Mack Air. I’ll review that and the start of the Okavango Delta part of the trip next time.

Interesting things found on the net.

Back during the
Cold War…the CIA actually invented something known as the Heart Attack Gun…it fired silently and used a frozen bullet of shellfish toxin that would melt and kill it’s target in just a few minutes. It was essentially a compressed air pistol and while it’s unknown if it was ever used the Soviet Union had a similar one that used frozen cyanide bullets that was employed at least twice.

And you might not have known this…but there was a
Greek man named Mihailo Tolotos born in 1856 and lived until the age of 82 who never saw a woman and only knew they existed from books. His mother passed away shortly after his birth and he was taken in and adopted by a cloistered Greek monastery on Mount Athos. The rules there specifically prohibited the presence of women or domestic animals (a prohibition that started in the 10th century and still observed today) and he grew up there before becoming a monk himself, never leaving the monastery until his death in 1938. He also never saw an automobile, movie, or airplane. 

The longest place name in the United States is Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg located in Massachusetts in the town of Webster. Since nobody knows how to spell the name…it’s locally known as Webster Lake.

Truth or Consequences, New Mexico got it’s name in 1950 because the radio quiz show of the same name ran a contest that the first town to change it’s name to that would be the site of a live broadcast of the show. Starting on March 1, 1950 the host (Ralph Edwards) visited the town the first weekend in May for 50 years for an even commemorating the broadcast.

Cyas.