Sense of Adventure

Or actually, just a pair of muskrats. They didn’t get up to anything … untoward during the short time I had them in view.

After writing some more on the new Rogue Angel yarn, I gathered up Emma Dog and took her off to the Nature Center for an afternoon walk. It’s a perfect Albuquerque Spring day: warm, clear, calm; the trees are getting green and the fruit trees and the lilacs fragrantly in bloom. A marked improvement over the gale we walked through a couple of days ago, and the Arctic day that followed it.

From the levee bike path I saw some big, soft-shelled spiny turtles sunning themselves down on the ditchbank. A guy cruised by us on a nifty recumbent tadpole trike, lower-slung and probably more expensive than my TriCruiser. Sometime this week I need to get my tricycle to a bike shop for an overhaul so I can start riding it before it gets brutally hot and I’ll snivel too much.

Not a lot of birdage about, though some of interest. Our usual Piper Cherokee-sized Canada geese kept flying low overhead, honking stertorously. As we walked north up the dirt path along the east side of the clear ditch, which is very pleasantly shaded by trees and brush, a bitty grey wren-like thing flew over with a whir that seemed to be a call, rather than the sound of its wings. It gave a little cheep as it lit in a tree to our left. Naturally it went promptly around the other side of a big branch where I couldn’t see. It seemed to have a very curved beak, almost like a thrasher. But they’re way bigger than this bird, which was so tiny I first thought it was a cicada - although we’re at the wrong end of the season to see them. It may’ve been a Canyon Wren.

There’s a notch in the ditchbank that leads right down from the trail to the water, perhaprs halfway between the footbridge that leads back to the east side and Montaño, where it’s convenient for Emma to go wade in the water and drink. As we approached it I heard a big woodpecker thudding away off in the bosque proper, across the ditch and the bike path.

And then when we got to the notch, right there swimming south and not eight feet from the bank I saw a muskrat. A beat later I saw a second toward the other side of the ditch. They both dove pretty promptly; one surfaced briefly under some brush overhanging the far side. I bet they have a burrow under there.

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