Of Magpies and Saber-toothed Porcupines

I'm home from the Wild West, more or less in one piece. I'm still a bit frazzled from the drive back as I drove the last 900 miles in one day, arrived here at 3 AM Saturday only to find a Jeep in my parking space, and it took another couple or three hours to have the fellow ticketed and towed.

Anyway, the trip was great: I met Valerie's family, all of whom I liked a lot, and as they didn't fill my pockets with rocks and upset the raft I guess they decided they could at least tolerate me.

We spent the first couple of days on a jet boat on the Salmon River aka River of No Return, camping out at nite before returning to the vehicles and driving up river 40 miles or so for another three days of camping, and rafting/kayaking the Salmon River downriver from Shoup, Idaho, again. It is a wonderful spot, full of rapids, big horned sheep, mountain goats, plenty of magpies, deer, elk, and, disbelieving Hawaiian types to the contrary, viciously predatory vampire porcupines.

We don't get magpies much in Wisconsin so I had pretty much forgotten about them, but there are a lot on the Salmon, and they look something like a palomino crow. Nice birds, and unlike the porcupines one doesn't have to worry about maintaining sufficient blood supply when they are around. In fact, after hearing that there were quite a few porcupines around Bear Lake, one scholarly type remarked that that might account for the scarcity of bison. The people in Hawaii are mighty lucky that the porcupine population there collapsed some time back- the current lack of bison in Hawaii just goes to show what an efficient predator the needle-backs are.

It's past my bedtime, so I'm going to sign off for now. G'nite all.