Archive for January 23rd, 2009

Stewardship

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

As I continue to do my own web site work, I am struggling with a great variety of issues. First and foremost is my lack of current skills with the tool sets. Back in the day, I had a pretty good grasp of Dreamweaver, but now, the latest and greatest versions with their multi-media integration, web 2.0 functionality and ability to scale from desktop to iPhone or Blackberry browse-ability have me frustrated. To wit, I am just going ahead and designing and publishing as I know how in the moment.

After a great meeting this morning with Dr. Patty Haugen, executive director of the St. Louis Audubon Center, I decided to do some rearranging. The new home page of Big Muddy Adventures will highlight the third component of the mission, stewardship.

What does BMA do in terms of stewardship? We clean up trash. We test water. We do presentations and teach and preach. We belong and participate in a number of watershed coalitions. Mostly, we bring others to see on reality’s terms how beautiful the rivers are. And when my time and talent catch up, I’ll have a web site that can produce something that my kids will find awesome and inspiring, like Will Steger Foundation’s Globalwarming101.com, with its “sick” Youth Action Video.

Maple Island and Pelicans

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

Yesterday, we paddled from the Alton Dam-Maple Island access, where the free flowing Mississippi begins, to the Confluence Canoe and Kayak Access in the late afternoon. Truly Audubon’s delight! 50 + Amercian Bald Eagles, 25 Great Blue Herons, 2 flocks of twenty or so American White Pelicans, a few large flocks of Canadian Geese, a thousand or more sea gulls, and towboats making busy, busy, while we moved downstream into a magnificent sunset meets river horizon, all that and the remnants of the ice pack lingering about, making some of the route seem like we were paddling through a slushy.

The pelicans have been a pleasant surprise these past two weeks. I hadn’t seen them since the middle of the Fall. Their graceful glide in the air is one of my favorite bird flight sights. At the Maple Island channel entrance, we came upon a flock. They flew off in a ruckus. All but one, a poor pelecanus americanus whose right wing was damaged beyond repair. I watched with much sadness as this great bird flapped furiously. We slid silently by as he swam slowly in the eddy, warily watching us, a castaway, destined to remain there until its circle of life is complete.