Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Love of the Land Rendezvous

July 24-26 was the Love of the Land Rendezvous, which, among other things, included a pow wow. Arjun and I walked over to the Little Feather Indian Center where we got a "famous" indian taco, very yummy! :) We'd never been in that building before, it's run by a woman from England and a man from The Netherlands. :) They were very nice people. After we got our tacos we went over to the pow wow for a while, I had to run home cause I forgot to grab my camera. After I came back I made sure to take a pic of the dead kingfisher that I saw on the road. Of course after that I got a few pow wow pics, but by then most of the really neat dances were over.

After that I went over to the Song of the Hiawatha Pageant grounds were they had a black powder shoot and booths. The people there were really neat. I got some tips about tanning our own deer hide by one guy, but he mainly said never do it! :P I was thinking since we were going hunting again this fall, it would be kind of neat to try it out and make something of the hide, but it takes too long soaking in lye etc, that I wouldn't be able to do it. One guy let me try the atlattle and I kicked Arjun's butt!! :P Haha, no, he did pretty good too. That same guy showed us his bow and his old style gun (I don't remember caliber etc) that he uses to hunt with. One thing that I thought was interesting (as I've only ever really seen it done in movies) is he said that you never poor gun powder directly from your horn into the gun cause if there's a hot bit and it sparks you're holding a bomb in your hand. If you're in battle that's another thing though as you don't have as much time. Also, there is a different kind of (finer) powder as the charge as there is inside the gun. :) I also got to try my hand with throwing a hatchet, I did quite well! It's actually not that hard really, I didn't realize it has so much to do with where you stand! It makes sense though. If you hit with the back of it then you're too close cause it didn't get enough time to make a full rotation. Also, you can start off throwing it with the blade pointing backwards, but then you have to stand further back, as it makes one and a half rotations and hits your target upside-down. Here's a pic of a guy doing it.

Well, we're almost done at work here. We just have to take vegetation samples at each nest site (we have 14 to do). We were going to do that today, but it's raining, so Arjun is going some data entry since he needs to make up more time than I do. We found out the the turkey nest we've been watching has hatched! Sadly though, the mallard nest we found got eaten. :( Oh well, such is life. One day just after I got done with the rest of my point counts and got into the truck, a red-headed woodpecker perched on the fence right in front of the truck! It was so pretty!! I was trying to slowly reach for my camera but it flew a few posts down before I got it out. So, you can still see it in this pic, but it was a lot closer before.

Also, I got to go into my very first corn field!! Haha, after seeing Forest Gump when I was young I always wanted to go into one, and the corn here is now some of the tallest it's ever been says a local farmer. :) Today I also spent some time taking pics around the interpretive center for your interest. :) I will put them up on another post.

1 comment:

  1. Yeah! I saw the red-headed woodpecker just once back in May!

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