It was a great Halloween week in Oklahoma with temperatures in the 70's and 80's. Knowing I was leaving soon to Argentina to work left me restless and I took to the fields and the roads. With the OKC Audubon group we glassed birds at Bluff Creek and the Bridgestone Preserve -- fall was just arriving and both places were breathtaking in their autumnal splendor. I went to Tulsa to visit old college friends and following spent a day at the Nature Conservancy's Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in beautiful Osage County hiking, reading and having a totally Garbo day (I vant to be alone). With looming thoughts of the 13 hour flight in coach class, the dogs certainly got a few extra long hikes at the park in Edgemere and Lake Hefner all week.
Fall finally comes to Edgemere Park
A cerulean sky frames The Nature Conservancy's Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Osage County in far northern Oklahoma. The buffalo were too far off in the distance to do justice with my 300mm lens. I was the only visitor to the park in the five hours I was there - pure bliss.
A flock of FOS Cedar Waxwings worked a dead oak tree near the park headquarters. Cedar Waxwings, although beautiful, are also the melancholy-inducing harbingers of winter just ahead.
Meandering along Sand Creek in the preserve was an almost out-of-place beautiful mixed forest of oak, hackberry, and walnut. The slanted November light produced a surreal effect to my own meandering. The forest floor was flush full of berries - virginia creeper, poison ivy, possum grape, greenbrier, coralberry, snailberry, soapberry - lots of food for everyone.
A red-headed woodpecker kept me company as I read from Ellen Meloy's beautifully written, but sadly posthumous, book: Eating Stone.
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