After work I thought “fuck it” and drove to Faribault. I parked at the trailhead of the Sakatah Singing Hills State Trail and biked 15 miles to Sakatah Lake State Park. I went there because I saw a public television special on the place and it looked fun, and they have an exclusive bike-in campsite.
The park is tiny but I had the place almost to myself so it seemed big enough. I sat on the dock during the enchanted sunset to dusk period and watched everything going on around me:
- an island colony of at least a thousand cormorants, herons and egrets making a cacophony
- two American white pelicans that floated across the lake unexpectedly
- orioles, green herons and occasional fireworks explosions
- a turtle that crawled out of the muck, looked around, and yawned. I did not know reptiles yawned.
- four dark sunspots that I could only see because of the haze due to the wildfires currently burning in Saskatchewan. The sun was hazy red and mild at that time of night and safe to view with binoculars, or so I assumed.
I looked it up later and confirmed there is sunspot activity now. It’s a wonder to me how a sphere of hydrogen undergoing fusion should be anything but uniform. Then again, with the huge forces at work there, why shouldn’t it be dynamic and violent? I also learned that the spots I saw were larger than earth in size.
I also found an aigrette, the fine feather of the egret’s breeding plumage. I had never seen one up close before.
pseudoisaac 