By Christine Dimke

When the alarm goes off in the morning, it is always a struggle of will.

“Do I go pheasant hunting or do I roll over, pull up the covers and go back to sleep?”

As music blares out of the radio, I decide to just get up and see if dad is awake. If not, then I can go back to sleep. Of course, he’s been up for an hour preparing and I’d better get going or we’ll be late.

I fall back into bed and the dream begins………I sigh and think of how cold it is this morning and how warm my bed is. I go get my stuff and remember my hat to cover my ‘disaster zone’ hair since I did not and will not brush it this morning. That is how it all starts.

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How Iowa is bringing back the nation’s largest waterfowl

by John Linquist

Photo by Roger Hill.

Everyone loves watching swans swimming on lakes and wetlands, but not that long ago trumpeter swans were almost extinct. Prior to the settlement of the Midwest, trumpeter swans nested throughout the region. However, human settlement and wetland drainage soon wiped them out.

Trumpeter swans were first given nationwide protection in 1918 when the United States, Canada and Mexico signed the International Migratory Bird Treaty. A swan count in the early 1930s showed that only 69 existed in the United States, and all of them lived at the Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in southwest Montana. more…