Blue Goose ~ Day 150

October 26, 2014 ~ Weatherford, KS to Elk City, OK

It was Sunday morning, a lovely quiet prairie morning full of sunshine and bird song. As I drove south on roads with almost no traffic, I felt as if I were in the musical "Oklahoma." There were meadowlarks everywhere, many in adult winter or immature plumages, either a muted yellow and black V or generally brown and streaked, but also a few bright adults.

Meadowlark - Oklahoma near Wichita Mtns. NWR

The Eastern and Western Meadowlarks look very much alike and have distinctive songs, BUT they can learn each other's songs and where ranges overlap it takes a better birder than me to figure it out.

It was springlike, especially since many fields were newly planted. I thought it was all winter wheat, but on checking the Internet, I learned many crops are planted here in September and October, including clovers and alfalfa. The dirt is red, the skies blue and the fields green with the occasional oil rigs around which the farmers plough.

Oklahoma in late October - near Wichita Mtns. NWR

While I won't say Oklahoma is the most scenic state I've seen, the Wichita Mountains NWR area reminded me of the Charles Russell NWR in Montana. It is also a huge and rugged refuge of over 59,000 acres, established in 1901. Part is designated a Wilderness area, the Charon's Garden Wilderness. Hiking there is for tough and experienced hikers as trails wander about the mountainous rocky terrain, can disappear and/or cross game trails. Bison and longhorn cattle graze on the refuge so visitors are cautioned to "not approach too closely."

A handsome little bird, the Black-capped Vireo, is a focus here as it is now a threatened species due to habitat loss, in part due to the use of fire as a management practice, along with egg predation by the Brown-headed Cowbird. Interesting that prescribed fires have this consequence, which must also affect other species if done in nesting seasons and habitats.

While walking a small scenic trail to a deep blue lake (always a stunning visual in arid country), I dropped my Canon. It will need to go back for repair as a horrid clicking sound is the only function it now has other than the message: "Lens Error." Upon researching "lens error" on the Internet, at least half of the comments mention "dropped." Ughhhh....

Wichita Mtns. NWR - OK

BUT, I had my Nikon in the car, back from the Nikon repair factory, all cleaned and ready for use after I charged the battery. I haven't decided if that camera will do or not at this point. I REALLY like the Canon. Did I find comfort in that it seemed half of Canon owners also drop their cameras???? Actually, yes.

There is an area extending from southern Kansas, through central Oklahoma and into central Texas called Cross Timbers. Basically, it's the boundary between the wooded east and the open plains of the west. Washington Irving made a trip here nearly 200 years ago:

WWW.THISLANDPRESS.COM

If you’d have talked to Washington Irving the night before he set out from Fort Gibson on his 1832 romp through Green Country, you would have thought he was a five-year-old with a one-way ticket to Disney World. Wide-eyed and giddy, he waxed poetic in letters to family about “pristine wilderness” and “herds of buffalo scouring their native prairies.” I picture him sitting cross-legged on a bunk bed as he scribbled in his journal about the Cross Timbers, the hodgepodge of forest, glade and savanna that stood between the forests of the east and the prairies of the west. It must be at its perfection in the spring, he wrote, and he planned to cross it to continue toward present-day Guthrie.  

In late fall, Irving reached the forest and met reality. “We were kept for many weary days toiling through a dismal series of rugged forests,” he wrote. “I shall not easily forget the mortal toil, and the vexations of flesh and spirit, that we underwent occasionally, in our wanderings through the Cross Timber. It was like struggling through forests of cast iron.” Sheila Chapman is a trail guide at the Keystone Ancient Forest Preserve, a slice of the Cross Timbers that sprawls over the uplands of the east side of Keystone Lake. The preserve reportedly contains the spot where Irving had camped 179 years ago. She showed me her copy of the book Irving published a few years after he’d finished with Oklahoma, A Tour on the Prairies; Irving’s less-than-sterling review of the Cross Timbers starts in chapter 21. Sheila thinks Irving might have had a point with that whole “forests of cast iron” thing. “If you can, imagine trying to ride through this, especially on horseback, and in the kinds of clothes they wore,” she said. “I can just see it getting ripped to shreds.” Many of the branches Sheila and I cleared from the trail as we hiked fell from what might have been the very same trees that gave the progenitor of the not-so-red-blooded Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane a new study on whining. In fact, the 1,300-acre tract is home to red cedar and oak trees that would have been mature growth when Francisco Vázquez de Coronado tore his way through the Oklahoma panhandle with his troops. 

Many of the visitors that signed the guest register in the VC were Hispanic.

There was a curiosity on the refuge, about a mile off the main route, that I had to check out. A sign said Holy City, and it turned out to be a collection of primitive red stone buildings, "Home of the Longest Running Outdoor Passion Play in America." A Congregational Austrian-born minister from the nearby town of Lawton started an Easter gathering here in 1926. It has been called the "Oklahoma's Oberammergau."

A lone bison grazed nearby.

Leaving the Wichita mountains, I drove north past a sign for the towns of Roosevelt and Apache, listening to classical guitar on the radio and reading historical markers detailing events of the Kiowa, Commanche and Apaches, and the US military.

I stayed Elk City, Oklahoma. It was 91 degrees and windy when I stopped for the night, and worked as an excuse for a motel. My room was on the second floor facing west. Just after a gorgeous sunset, with the skies still rosy, I looked out and saw dozens of Scissor-tailed Flycatchers twittering about the large trees on the edge of the parking lot, doing a pre-roosting frolic. It was one more Blue Goose vignette I will always remember.

Scissor-tailed Flycatchers - Elk City, OK