Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me a match...
So, if anyone out there is interested in picking up men, especially rugged outdoors type guys, I can't recommend wearing camo enough. In order to go photographing with Wheeler and Tekiela we were ordered to be in full camo, plus they covered us in tarps so the birds would see nothing at all. When we arrived in Duluth, we stopped at a gas station for some coffee and breakfast sandwiches in our camo pants and jackets. As we entered, every male eye in the place was on us. I opened the refrigerator case for nice wholesome bottle of milk when I heard a roguish voice ask, "So, you ladies up here deer hunting?" He cocked his eye brow, coyly and gave a knowing smile.
I wanted to tell the truth, that we were going to sit on the ground covered in a tarp, watch hawks soar overhead and listen to two of the greatest bird photographers of our time go "clickity, click, click, click, click" with their cameras. Alas, I decided to flirt back and sound macho so I gave a little white lie and said, "We're hawk trapping!!" (we do go up for hawk trapping, however we were not this particular day).
He looked bewildered and a little disappointed that I wasn't going to go out and take out a buck with a nice rack (while sporting a nice rack of my own--ba da ching). Anyway, I tried to make it sound cool and exciting, but really in thirty seconds of flirting it's incredibly difficult to get the finer point of hawk trapping across. Knowing my luck, he probably thought I was going to kill hawks and is turning me in as I type.
The moral of the story was that if you want to meet men, go to a gas station wearing camo...it's a turn on.
This is a bird chick blog so, I should mention birds seen up in Duluth LOT AND LOTS of bald eagles! We had a kettle of about 7 eagles at one point and one of them turned out to be a golden eagle. We also saw many rough legged hawks. I saw more dark morph rough legs yesterday than I have in my entire life. Other points of interest included black-backed woodpeckers, snow buntings, lapland longspurs, gray jays, harriers, and my favorite raptor the goshawk!