Three miles east of Fort Calhoun is Boyer Chute N.W.R., under the management of the very popular, large DeSoto Bend N.W.R. across the river east of Blair. (DeSoto occasionally runs an old TV documentary I'm in.) DeSoto is where most of the metro population go to see the migrating flocks of ducks and geese by the thousands, especially snow geese, in spring and fall. It also has a superb collection of artifacts recovered from the sunken steamboat Bertrand. Boyer Chute is much smaller, 2,000 acres with five miles of trails, considered a prime birding site, though DeSoto Bend north of it and Fontenelle Forest down in Bellevue have larger bird counts. As DeSoto Bend has an oxbow lake formed when the Missouri cut through a shorter, straighter path, so Boyer Chute is a fast straight channel off the Missouri with an "island" between this side channel and the big river. As with Fort Atkinson, I last visited it during the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, because the keel boats for that celebration were moored there.
Ordinarily, I'm not fond of Boyer Chute because I don't like flatness, though I've driven down to the large Squaw Creek N.W.R. near Mound City, Missouri, for the birding (saw an eagle tearing a fish apart in a roadside ditch there once), and that's all flat, north of a hilly ridge. But Boyer Chute trails are easy because they are flat and short loops. Seemed a good way to end the day, despite my knees muttering grimly.
Boyer Chute became just a short visit, my knees finally Halloween-night banshees, shrieking after a full day of walking in all the different places, so I didn't get far down a trail beyond the bridge across the narrow chute. It was all about textures, starting with what I parked under, these.
My view from the bridge, to crib from Arthur Miller, the wispy willow in front of the tree with the freeze-dried green leaves in front of the winterized cottonwoods, our state tree.
Squirmy calligraphy by borers, probably the tree's killers. Zoom in for a better reading.
Cottonwood corduroy. With a good ground-floor apartment for wildlife this winter. And green plants amid the skeletal trees.
A jumble strung with red vines and leaves hiding the surprise shown below it, tiny pearls.
So what if I scarcely moved over the weekend?! "Un bel di," One Fine Day, to crib from Puccini, a day to sing about.
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