December 9, 2018

Out on Lake Mendota today: trumpeter swans.



Video'd by me from the beach on Picnic Point.

25 comments:

Greg Hlatky said...


Swans are mean, nasty birds.

Not Sure said...

"Trumpeter swan song" sounds ominous

rhhardin said...

The trombone swans migrate through first.

tcrosse said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

TRUMPeter better than HILLAReter

Darrell said...

When does the Lake Mendota Monster appear?

Darrell said...

The trombone swans migrate through first.

Womp. Womp.

tcrosse said...

On Eating Swans

Carol said...

A nice quiet Sunday and I was reading Who We Are and How We Got Here, and the spouse puts on his fave Siberian Steamroller stuff....gah.

Why o Lord.

Heartless Aztec said...

That's some cold water. I've got my 3/2 taped seam front entry wetsuit here for north east Florida and that's still hypothermic after a couple of hours. Those are some tough birds. Are they tasty?

Churchy LaFemme: said...


Hung velvet overtaken me
Dim chandelier awaken me
To a song dissolved in the dawn
The music hall a costly bow
The music all is lost for now
To a muted trumpeter swan
Columnated ruins domino
Canvass the town and brush the backdrop
Are you sleeping, Brother John?

chickelit said...

Video'd by me from the beach on Picnic Point.

I'm confused. That looks like Picnic Point in the background which means you were standing somewhere in University Bay. Or is that "Eagle Heights" in the background, taken from Picnic Point?

YoungHegelian said...

You can always tell the difference between the Trumpeter & the Schumpeter swans because the latter are always honking on about how the tasty fish always seem to found in four cycles.

Hagar said...

Reading Amy Tan's "Where the past begins" and am surprised to read that she likes to go downhill skiing. Well that's one way she is different from Althouse.

rehajm said...

The Trump boom is no sugar high

The real contradiction in the “sugar high” argument is that it ignores the slow growth of the Obama years, which featured an avalanche of debt spending. Deficits as a share of GDP were 9.8% in 2009, 8.6% in 2010, 8.3% in 2011 and 6.7% in 2012. Where was the sugar high then? Instead of the expected burst in output coming out of the 2008-09 recession, borrowing more than $1 trillion a year for four years yielded the worst recovery since the Great Depression. Even excluding 2009, Mr. Obama’s deficits averaged more than 5% of GDP throughout the rest of his presidency but produced less growth than Mr. Trump has with lower deficits.

Fritz said...

Blogger surfed said...
That's some cold water. I've got my 3/2 taped seam front entry wetsuit here for north east Florida and that's still hypothermic after a couple of hours. Those are some tough birds. Are they tasty?


Less fishy than Bald Eagle, but not as good as Spotted Owl.

wildswan said...

Still seeking a sighting of the sandhill cranes. I've been to two sanctuaries and to the Nebraska sandhills. But always they have gone somewhere else. Yesterday, seventy years ago, whatever, always they left. Next year, the sandhill cranes.

Original Mike said...

@wildswan - You should come to Wisconsin, we're lousy with them. Every spring friends and I participate in an organized "crane count". Some years we see a few, some years many, but we also see them. You'll see sandhills, guaranteed.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/citscitoolkit/projects/icf/midwestcranecount/

Original Mike said...

also = always

Ralph L said...

If Althouse went out there at 5 AM, she could hear them tweet.

tim in vermont said...

Come to South Florida, you can see sandhill cranes picking through the dumpster at Pollo Tropical among other places.

tim in vermont said...

As common as sandhill cranes are around here, it's still pretty majestic to see them fly.

rehajm said...

Cute dig in the WSJ editorial calling for Mueller to wrap it up:

All of this argues for Mr. Mueller to wrap up his probe and let America get on with the political debate over its meaning for Mr. Trump’s Presidency. Mr. Mueller has been investigating for 19 months, and the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign began in July 2016, if not earlier. The country deserves an account of what Mr. Mueller knows, not more factual dribs and drabs in sentencing memos.

Narayanan said...

Has Romney been asked about what his Bain Buds are doing with tax windfall?

Eric said...

Lotsa black swans there. Is this some sort of omen?