Going South

We've worked our way south through Illinois, heading for warmer climes. We had to make a couple of one-night stops in order to find some warmth, but once we got to Southern Illinois, by golly we found it.

Outbuilding in Central Illinois

We spent 4 days at the South Sandusky Army Corp of Engineers (USACE, or COE) campground on their Rend Lake Project. Rend Lake is a 13 mile long by 3 mile wide 18,900 acre impoundment surrounded by 20,000 acres of land.

Just a Small Part of Rend Lake

The campgrounds are well maintained, and gorgeous, as is typical for COE managed areas. They offer a wide variety of campsites,

Nice Park-like Setting

from manicured backyard types 

Bottomland

to more rustic wooded bottomland ones.

Full Hookup Site

We spent 2 days in a full hookup spot on the eastern shore of Sandusky Cove and then moved to a electric only site on the northern shore of the same cove.

It was sunny and warm during the day and cool at night. We were at this same site (the second one),  a couple of years  ago when a tornado blew through, knocking down lots of trees. The Corp has since cut up the fallen trees, but left the wood on the ground. They're encouraging campers to gather it and burn it as firewood, and we were happy to take them up on the offer. Also, when people depart from their sites, they leave their unused firewood behind for others to gather. This worked well for us as the folks across the way from us left a lot of nice hardwood all split and ready to burn. We had a couple of campfires, but we still left quite a bit of that nice wood for the next guys.

Both of our sites were located on peninsulas, so we had a 3-sided panoramic view from the HOW. 

View From the HOW

Fall Colors at Rend Lake

The fall colors were beginning to show what God's paintbrush can do.

Our Closest Neighbors

We were one of two occupied campsites in our loop, the other being some tents way down the road. Beautiful, peaceful, quiet; what more could we have wanted ...Pelicans? 





Yep! God brought us here during the fall migration stop-over of the American White Pelican. Some of North America's largest birds, rivaled only by the California Condor, these suckers have up to 9-FOOT wingspans. While we're not strangers to these birds, they're common along the Mississippi River, and we've even seen them flying along the Kishwaukee River, we've never witnessed their cooperative hunting behavior.

Unlike Brown Pelicans which dive from the air into the water to scoop up fish in their flexible bills, American White Pelicans swim along the surface and scoop up fish as they come upon them.

When they are in a group, they team up, swim in formation to, for lack of a better word,  herd the fish.

American White Pelicans Capturing Their Prey

American White Pelicans "herding" fish

Once the Pelicans have enough fish crowded into a small space, they dip their bills into the water and scoop up their prey.

Sometimes, they kind of half-fly/ half-swim to gather even more.

Game On!

Gotcha!

AGAIN!

It's truly a remarkable behavior.

I apologize for taking so long to get this episode published. For some reason I had to keep dropping into the HTML editor to get the text and pictures to behave. It took FOREVER! I don't know why, but I think that perhaps Blogger can't handle the amount of content I post, especially the size of the pictures. I could compress them but I want you, my readers, to be able to click on a picture and get a full size quality image. I may have to go with a more robust blog provider. We'll see...