on the way home from Calderone, July 6

.

Clover in the golf course parking lot.





When we were ready to go home, east-bound I-94 was packed with cars moving verrrrry slowly.

We decided to take an alternate route. I'm not sure exactly how we came home. We headed south across the expressway, and then headed eastward.

Look what we found!





Swans! Two adults with two youngsters.

Don't you just *love* that you can look up anything, any time? Even though we're not allowed to live in the Library of Congress? (Which would be a very cool place to live, now that I think of it.....)

Checking out a swan identification page, we attempt to discern whether these are tundra swans, or trumpeters. Trumpeters at one time were vanishingly rare, we conclude after five minutes research, and yet ... the bird on the right where you see two adults, and in the pic with only one adult, definitely has the orange at the edge of its bill near the corners of its "lips"......... It also has a rather flat head, and the feathers look to be going down its forehead in a V shape......

Wouldn't that be cool, if we actually saw trumpeters?

These are definitely different from the swans we saw at Gallup Park, which had the orange bills of mute swans.

Ok. Another 15 minutes of research. I have found resources that show reintroduction of trumpeters in Michigan, that clearly show trumpeters in Washtenaw County in the last several years, and that show the breeding grounds for tundras as being, well, on the tundra, *way* north of here. I am going to tentatively conclude these are, in fact, trumpeters.

Cool.





While we were parked on the shoulder looking at the swans, a family of ducks ran across the road. The ducklings are much closer to the size of the parents than were the cygnets.





We also saw a family of deer (mom and twins; dads don't hang out with the rest of the family) on the way home, but we zipped by much too quickly to get a pic.

In Alaska's Denali national park, they talk about trying to get glimpses of the Big Five -- grizzlies, Dall sheep, caribou, moose, wolves.

In southeast Michigan, the Big Five might be sandhill cranes, turkeys, deer, coyotes, and swans. (We are pointedly ignoring Canada geese, who are no longer hard-to-see wildlife, but rather have become a scourge of any suburban place with water, as they multiply like rats and leave behind a lot more excrement than rats....)

We had a very successful wild-life spotting trip on the 5th!

.