Sweetwater Swamp

"It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon."

Lake Wobegon is gone, now, a casualty of what someone said was a host's hand on her back.

I went to the Sweetwater Wetlands, just a mile or two from here, because it is a cool, quiet, sunny morning after just enough rain to measure and brag about. "Maybe there will be birds!", I thought.

I think I thought wrong.

There were far more birders than birds. A couple of ornery-thologists had staked themselves out under a cottonwood tree, far enough apart to provide triangulation, and informed each other and me that there was a Baltimore Oriole up there. I tried to see something, but my neck muscles are not made for steady vertical sightings. I took a side path.

"It is a quiet morning," I said to someone arriving just as I was leaving. "Yes, it is," he agreed, "but you should have been here yesterday. There was a whole busload of screaming school kids."

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