Old Coot Visits

Cubs win two more. Enough said. The big happening this weekend was the visit by an old Coot.
No, not Jay or Dick from Chicago or Barry from out east. This was a fine feathered Coot who must have taken a errant right turn while migrating up the Mississippi. It was a typical Saturday morning with JoAnne dreaming up projects for the day and me dreaming up excuses not to be involved in the projects. I was hard at work watching the birds at the feeders when something caught my eye. Out next to our venerable '93 Honda Civic was a bird quite a bit larger than the usual visitors. After closer scrutiny, I realized that it was an American Coot. Now I had recently seen literally thousands of them while I was photo chasing White Pelicans along the river. But, we live 30 or 40 miles from the river in the middle of town. No water anywhere near us let alone seaweed or minnows. The Coot seemed to enjoy the safety of the Honda and would crawl under it and rest for a while then would occasionally search the lawn for some sort of food. He (I assume he was a male because he wouldn't ask for directions) wasn't too concerned with passing traffic and if a person would approach him, he would retreat under his friend, the car. He stayed around all day and was still roosting under the car at 11 pm Saturday night. Sunday morning he was gone. (must have either caught the scent of the fresh donuts from Casey's or gotten a peek at our GPS in the other car. At any rate he left without so much as a thanks for the hospitality or a sorry for pooping on your lawn. I did manage to get a photo or two while he was here.

On the not so neat side of things, we found out that JoAnne's niece down in Chicago suffered the loss of her apartment (and everything in it) in a pretty nasty fire last week. The apartment and all of its contents were wiped out. Fortunately, everyone escaped without injury and only stuff was lost. I tried to include some photos but, being new at this Blog thing, I screwed up and it didn't work. If you really are interested in seeing them, I can arrange a private showing for you.