We figured out real quick how that place got it's name. This place 103 miles from Helena and is ground zero to see the migration habits of thousands and I mean thousands of waterfowl and birds in general. Since re entry from Mexico I've been freezing , the locals say spring is 2 or 3 weeks behind usual....bad luck. This morning as I shot these pics it was 28 degrees with a 20 mph wind. As I fumbled with a camera we met a couple of retired educators from Alaska who new my nephew in law and basically told me to quit sniveling about the cold....after all, we're ahead of Alaska in the spring department .
So needing an adventure badly we leave the house an hour before sunrise after rolling out of the sack at 5 a.m.. We stop at the Town Pump for our favorite breakfast sandwiches and witness the early morning crowd at the store.....well, a guy with a cowboy hat and a side arm was looking out for everybody. We get to the Freeze Out Lake waterfowl management area and pull up to the kiosk to get the handout info and walla , our first bird ,we see this guy froze to the ground steps away from the kiosk. Weird.
So we park where several people with those Spots Illustrated kind of camera lenses are set up and we find out yesterday was the day, 80,000 birds were there. We also found out that they fly north or into the fields to eat at sunrise so you need to be there on time. Now I'm a research guy and my friend John told me to go early but I shoulda asked what he means by early. So, we missed the bite by a day and then the mini bite by an hour....but the good news was the lazy ones or the one that were just as cold as us were still around.
Naturally the wild life photographers were impressed with my equipment. This old Minolta second gen digital camera has been with me since 1998. I explain to a guy that it has great telephoto and because it's only 3.2 mega pixel I don't have to manipulate anything to print Mile !4... AND it has an actual look through view finder for aim and shoot which works out in about 10 % of your shots. And yes that stuff you see on the handle of the camera is Pro Cure from Kenai River fish bait... I've been gone going now 3 years and I think I finally don't have any Pro Cure stains on my body or especially in my hair, the stuff is like radiation, you can't get rid of it.
So we drive on with more hot coffee and come across this scene . I say ' they're bedded down " and MP gets the new Bino's out that I bought her during our intro to birding and life in the 48 back in Green Valley AZ 2021. She focus's on the birds " seagulls " she says...and I ask Glaucous Wing or Bonaparte's ? , surely they couldn't be Herring Gulls .
Then we hit the mother lode . MP scans yet another frozen Freeze Out Lake and there he is, a coyote mid lake that new he was out of shooting range in more ways than one. But I parked as close as we could and hit magnum magnify and got this wild action shot....pretty impressive huh.....he's toward the upward middle.
Before we move onto the hypothermia picnic we had this shot here is my favorite. Like golfers say. it's the shot that keeps you coming back...or...maybe not....might get me to the digital camera store.
So we drive onto Choteau Montana . Mmmmm, I love these little towns, as I took pics with the Minolta I even had cowboy pulling a stock trailer give me a big ol wave and a smile. Now it was still early in the morning, it doesn't take long to tour Freeze Out Lake with a wind chill of -52 so maybe the town was just quiet. Or, there ain't a hell of a lot of people there. I took these pics of downtown and the Penske moving van was headed out of town, not into town .
But Choteau Montana is not without interesting things . Montana I believe is the USA Dinosaur capital . It even looks like good Dinosaur habitat. So I got this Triceratops and of course every small town in Montana has cool old Movie Theatre. Now it didn't have a Buckhorn Bar like most but it did have and Antlers Bar, that's kinda the same thing ain't it ?
You don't approach 1/4 million reads if you're a blogger that doesn't see the obvious, everyday. every hour, every second .....it's right in front of you. THIS place is flat gorgeous ! ...but cold...stop that Jeff.
So as we cruised the Rocky Mountain Front we snapped pics on a road neither of us had been on in our lives. So we have a new area to highlight on the map of our travels....Well played MPeasy, thanks for hanging around, it was a great day and I'm finally warm......JEFF stop that !
