The Hunt for Tody, it takes a lot of Cojones

There is always a bird out there taunting me.  The nemesis bird, big and small vex us all.  It seems no where is safe from the nemeses.  So goes the story of Tody

The 2019 version of the New Year's family trip was going to Costa Rica instead of St Martin for the obvious reason that our house was gone and for two additional  reasons.  First, my son, Tyko bought me a Costa Rican bird guide as a gift. I figured it was an omen.  Secondly, Suncountry as cheap

and direct flights to Liberia.  It was difficult to find accommodation on short notice but we found two rooms at the small Finca Verde Lodge.  It was neither nature hotel nor much of anything.  It was out of the way, in the forest featured only four rooms and it must be birdy, I assumed

As I suspected the flight south on Suncountry was late.  It wasn’t for the lack of a plane.  A bad snowstorm was coming and the area around the airport was coated in freezing rain. Driving to the airport took cajones, big ones.  I peered over a rather slick and steep hill on Danvers Avenue north of the MSP airport and it was like looking into a abyss, but inch by inch, I slid the truck down and then crossing the Minnesota River cars were all over the highway.  People passed the first six car pile up and tried to drive fast.  Behind us, someone was sideways on the bridge.  Luckily, we got through but a flight attendant didn’t and our departure was pushed back well over an hour..  Such are the joys of travel.  We’d get there when we got there and although I was worried about finding our tiny hotel in the dark, I guess we’d get there too, when we got there.  Even if it was tomorrow.     

There are five things that one needs for a stress-free and happy trip.  First, the airlines need to fly on-time and safely.  One’s luggage needs to arrive, and you need to pack the correct items.  Then, you need your local transportation, you can't spend the entire trip at the airport.  Forth, you need your hotel or at least a hotel.  Finally, you need some food, eventually.  Well, on this trip, we had some of these.  Is 2 out of 5 not bad?  How about just one?

As a person who packs light, packing is usually easy.  Often the question is whether to bring a towel or not to bring a towel, but this is a different sort of trip.  The night before departure, our son Allwin checked up the weather report.  Liberia, Costa Rica is the driest place in Costa Rica and it is firmly in dry season.  I had my rain forest gear packed—camera rain guards, dry bag, rain coat, rain hiking hat, and assorted smaller waterproof bags, zip locks and such.  I scratched my head, as my carry-on was tight on space, and at the hotel in Minneapolis, I rechecked the weather, dry skies ahead for as far as we could see.  So, I throw out the raincoat, the second coat, then the dry bag and seeing I could squeeze in a bathrobe, I through it all out.  Then somehow, I forget to put all but a two shirts back in.  Now, I’m ready (except for not knowing I forgot to pack many shirts)

 Our 9 AM departure time slides as we realize something or someone is missing, first, to 10 and then 11, we board. then we got two flight attendants that show, one goes and the other stays, that takes thirty minutes to sort out, then we got to de-ice.  We leave three hours late.  It is a safe flight.  So, we land safely, get through customs and I hunt for Hertz.  Hertz is always the best?  I find the guy.  “My Daniel.  I got good news and bad news for you.  We no longer have a car for you, but these guys over here, do.  They have just the car.”     

It turns out they did for $600 more money and the Tucson becomes a Prius, which becomes a Tucson again.  No deals there.  The guy gave me a card to call so I could get a better rate next time.  What can you do?  I can complain to Hertz.  They aren’t going to help.  We needed a car.  It was late, the family was starving and we still had a couple of hours to drive in the dark, maybe only forty five miles but the traffic in Liberia is awful we are warned.  We headed out.   We found our hotel, the Finca Verde Lodge, in Bijaqua, on the slopes of the Tenorio Volcano.  We creep up a dark and rutted road to a sign that is painted on an old satellite dish.

It turns out they have a small restaurant, it looks open and for a moment we look saved.  Then it starts to rain outside, not just a gentle rain but big ole fat rain, the potholes are soon large puddles.  “This is the dry season?”  I ask the members of the family.  We walk in and look to check in at the bar.  "Daniel..."  The woman makes a face.  "Mr. Allwin..."  She has my middle name for some reason.  Jorge, the manager happens to be there, she motions him over. he makes a face.

“What is your name?”  he asks me again looking confused in very Spanish English.  He sighs.  “Well, I got some bad news for you.  We didn’t think you were coming.  You didn’t answer my email.”  I show him my Travelocity booking number.  He motions that away

I put my hand to my face.  I play with my phone, turning it on to foreign charges.  I know I didn’t get an email, I got a hotels.com message to confirm, which I had actually done that (I thought it was to confirm two rooms), but then I missed the second one.  I was in the RV somewhere in Texas.  I hadn’t been on hotels.com since November.  Now the rain isn’t bothering me so much, since we apparently don’t have a room.  Then Jorge’s eyes light up as the woman (probably his sister) says something to him coming from the back.  “I have good news and bad news for you.  We have no rooms tonight, but tomorrow, lots of room.”  Thinking now we will be sleeping in the car or at the open-air café, I look back at my annoyed family.  I could at least bundle myself in my rain coat except that it is in a bag in the back of our truck in Minneapolis. 

Luckily, it turned out that was just the bad news, he had some cabin he knew of where we could stay at for the first night.  So, we followed him down the hill and shockingly were invited in to two not so bad rooms.  We had to trudge through the mud a little, but it worked.  We came back, and ordered food, and went to sleep hoping the rain was an anomaly.  It wasn’t.  It turns out, Liberia is in a whole different climate than just a little ways up here.  The weather report up in Bijagua?  Rain, with chances of thunderstorms, followed by more rain, heavy rain, intermittent with thick fog followed by mist with occasional rain.  The room was dry and I awoke to the something noisy outside.  I suspected howler monkeys, but just couldn’t see them, as I couldn’t even see the chairs outside, it was that foggy.  Then I noticed my lack of basically anything clothing related save my bathrobe.  I put in on, walked out and sat down.  Then I took it off, no one could see me anyhow.  I let the drizzle cool my idiocy.  I go to a rainforest and I talk myself out of bringing rain gear.  Olaf is the stupidest man in the universe.  I see a flash of yellow, then a song.  It is a kiskadee, or maybe a boat-billed flycatcher, the first I have, the second, I need.  The bird is perched somewhere, I can’t even see the line of hedge it is perched on.  I hear unidentified parrots flying over.  I look in my guidebook.  Six species could be here.  At least the monkeys are identifiable.  Nothing sounds like howlers.  I walk in and go back to bed.  No use birding, the weather had me beaten.  We eventually get organized, have breakfast, watch the rain intensify, and lode up the car with our stuff.  We drive into the village to see what is available.  The answer is little.  No umbrellas, and only emergency rain ponchos and garbage bags.  We load up on both.  We drive around, find a French hotel with a nice restaurant up the hill which surprisingly had rooms, I see a few birds which quiets the spirit and we go check in.

After that, some surprising things happened.  First, the life at the hotel improved, our rooms at Finca Verde were not as nice as the one night.  But after two nights, they upgraded us to the one really nice room they had.  We gave that to the kids.  Secondly, the rain…ah the rain.  Bad weather and Olaf is like red wine and red meat.  I checked the report again and it looked horrid but then something odd happened.  The weather gods gave us a break.  The fog parted, the rain ended, and the weather forecasts proved wrong.  The sun even came out.  I never took my rain poncho even out of the bag it came in.  Even the day we went to the very wet St. Elaena Preserve on the next volcano, Arenal, a place it always rains, but it didn’t.

It became an odd trip, as everyone, everyone looked at us odd that we were staying for eight nights in Bijagua.  From the waitstaff to the managers of the hotels, to other tourists, everyone asked the same question.  Eight nights, here?  I seemed birdy and there were some trails assuming the weather held.

    The second morning my daughter learned a valuable life lesson about shoes in the tropics or even for the desert.  One must always check what is in your shoes before you put them on.  I’ve had mice, scorpions, and my daughter, now, three-inch spiders.

A scream went out in the rainforest as we were readying for our first hike.  “There is something in my show”, Lauren said pulling out her foot in a bit of a panic.  She looked in shock.  We laughed and then a realization.

Hey, something IS in the shoe, it doesn’t want to come out

That is a really BIG spider!  Yuck!

Lessons learned and with nothing else to do.  We started a slow search for birds especially, the hunt for tody, the tody motmot, a bird that I’ve searched for in Belize twice, Honduras, once, and well, let me put it this way: I have seen more jaguars, more ocelots, more poisonous snakes, slept on more docks, and been rescued more by Francis Ford Copula than I’ve seen tody motmots.  In Costa Rica, they are found only around three volcanoes, the two that Bijagua sits in between, and another farther northwest.  It was one of three birds I really wanted to see.  The aracari wasn’t even a lifer bird.  I had seen one on the steps of a pyramid but had run out of film twenty years earlier, the resplendent quetzal would be something very lucky to find the single day we would be visiting its habitat a three-hour drive away.

Luckily, the local trails we hiked in were prime tody habitat, so I just pretended to be hiking.  But as the week went on one thing became clear, I was seeing a steady diet of lifer birds, but not tody.  I listened, I called, I even used payback a little but nothing.   I wanted to find toucans but none of them appeared.  We got lucky and got a reservation  at the French place for New Years eve, that was nice.  January 1 night?  Crackers and peanut butter.  Nothing was open or at least open and had food.  Then a got a desired photo, a collared aracari, then it seems, they were everywhere, even the local feeder

one amigo at the feeder

then two and would you believe three?

how about four?

five?  

Could there ever be five collared aracaris on a platform?  Yes, but the variegated squirrel said otherwise as the fifth landed it came and stole the banana.

then we got yellow-throated toucans

keel-billed toucans

We saw Lesson's motmot

Broad-billed motmot but no Tody

Between the lumps, the splits, the renames, it was overwhelming.  I'm still looking at photos.

What IS this?  Three-striped warbler in the field guide but it is now a Costa Rican warbler, who knew?

Gosh and then there were the butterflies....I just punted, it was 4th down and 70, in a real game I would have taken the safety...geez.

I posted this butterfly on an ID page and got laughed at as what I was thinking  wasn't even in the same end of the field guide.  It was a butterfly, but skippers are as close to swallowtails as where I was looking.  Funny thing, even the expert couldn't ID it as to a species, family....a Costa Rican butterfly guide would be needed except it seems, it would be a Nobel prize worthy project.

Then we have flycatchers....OMG

Kiskadee versus Social flycatcher versus Gray-capped versus rusty-margined?

Wait, they are white-ringed flycatchers.  White-ringed?

this is a gray-capped.  I identified both on the plane home.  The life list keeps giving

My wife wanted to see a quetzel before they go extinct, so we drove up into the highlands, three hours by bad roads.  We hiked in a preserve, but all we found was quick glances at small birds and poisonous snakes

Don't worry, this isn't a real Fer-de-lance, only a salmon-bellied racer, it won't kill you, they are pretty feisty though....there were other snakes, scary snakes, snakes in the trail.

So no quetzel...so we went to lunch.  I saw four individual birds sitting outside after lunch, all lifers and the only ones of the trip

Magenta-throated woodstar

Striped-tailed hummingbird

Silver-throated tanager

And then...he flew by, not a tody, but a male resplendent quetzel THE bird of Costa Rica

holy cow, the worst photo ever, but still identifiable...wow, four birds, four lifers, and an overpriced tourist lunch and we weren't even on a tour.  We voluntarily walked in.

We continued roaming around and seeing single birds that were representing lifer species

We saw a black cowled orioles

 Even pacific screech owls, we had two at this roost we stumbled upon when I was trying to point out a red-lored parrot seen clearly through a window above them.  My wife thought I was joking.  "Your showing us the owls correct?"  

"What Owls?"  It was a lucky parrot

the lucky parrot shot through a hole a foot above a hard to find owl

I saw a slate throated redstart, not a lifer, but still cool

 a slate tailed trogon (female) 

 A white collared manikin 

We had sloths over out cabin...

Everybody was trying to get in on the tourist dollars to see sloths 

I'm not sure how well that worked though.  I guess any body that stops is a bonus.

We had Capuchins raiding bananas

  
Howler monkeys waking us up, every morning at first light

and waterfalls

We floated the river for boat billed herons and bitterns.

No tody!  But we were seeing a tremendous variety of birds.  So the search for Tody continued on to the last day.  I went out early and grabbed a local guy who showed tourists the sloths, he seemed to know some about Tody, yea, close by, yes, we started 150 feet from where I woke up and then.....he whistled and then it answered, we got closer and closer it kept answering and then...IT RAINED!!!!!  We aren't so lucky as a mist or a passing shower, it hadn't rained this hard all week, and Manny went back to the cafe.  I followed, slipping on the the mud climbing out of the rivine.  I had breakfast, drank coffee and swore quietly.  SO CLOSE!!!!!  I finally walked out to the road and screamed.  Screaming helps sometimes.  The rain stopped.  Manny saw me walking back.  "You okay boss?  I heard a funny noise."  He asked.  "Go find Tody now."  He said and off we went, he whistled once and there it was.  Tody motmot

Lifer tody motmot

We fist bumped and he went back to work and then the family went out for the final hike.  I walked four hundred yards on the volcano to the north and then another tody flew in.

It was also there on the way back, another flew over my head, and then that evening, they called behind my bed, one was on the way to drinks, motmot here, motmot there, a tody motmot everywhere.  The way it goes.  One day's nemesis is another's trash bird.   It was time to go home, now that the birding gods were mocking me.

It took my seven days to get the photo of the lone long billed hermit feeding at a small group of flowers ever morning at 0830 over a river.  five mornings I could not get a shot and on the final morning I got a photo, one hard bird to get and even at this, it isn't that good of a photo.

\

It was a bit overwhelming.  63 lifer birds....and a great family trip.  It was a fun spontaneous trip, it seemed we got by at times on a wing and a prayer but no one died, just one awfully big spider in a shoe and some close encounters of the slithering kind.  I left some Costa Rica on the bone, so I'll be back.  Tody....?  Nemesis no more that bird.....I came I saw, and then I saw some more...oh well....even a bonus quetzel,  and even the Vikings won....life is GOOD

Olaf

Pearl

 

We were driving home from Florida and I got a message from Barry Parkin of Aberdeen, SD that there was a Project Snowstorm Snowy in my area.  Unfortunately, we were still in Missouri, and that evening when we were home, we had to hustle off to Wisconsin to start our Christmas celebration.  I wasn't even sure what Project Snowstorm was, I had assumed he was talking about the weather.

Barry resent me a pin location on the 23rd, so deciding that a 60 mile drive was better than a 500 mile drive up to NW Minnesota to get my year owl, it was then he sent me a link. This owl I was chasing even had a name..."Pearl"

Pearl is a two-year-old female snowy owl, trapped Nov. 27, 2019, near Woodworth, ND by Matt Solensky of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Prairie Research Center,and named for nearby Pearl Lake. Her transmitter was funded by generous donations from the public.  It had made a bee-line for my ranch right after it was tagged.

The grey dot is my ranch, it spent December 12th on my property.

So, I went owl hunting.  I struck out on the 23rd.  My daily tally, a kestrel and 12 horned larks driving 40 miles up on the Coteau, the Coteau des Prairie is a barren, windswept, lifeless place this time of year.  Back at my house I was pleased to say.  "I've got siskins!"  Always a nice, albeit transient bunch of birds.

Including this one with something weird going on with it's beak.

I got going earlier on Christmas eve, it is better to look for snowy owls at first light.  I was going to have a Christmas owl if it killed me, so in the fog, off I went to usually where it is the foggiest place in South Dakota, but oddly today, it was the clearest, well, it was till gray and a bit foggy.  At least around here, it was about as good as it could be.

I climbed up on the Coteau, drove around, I met up with a coyote hunter.  He told me a cryptic tale of his son having been seeing snowy owls around as he worked nearby.  It wasn't a hot tip so we parted ways.  I flushed, of all things a greater prairie chicken, no small find itself, at least up here.  There are a few occasionally around.  I saw one ten years ago, thirty miles northwest of here.  Some birds are probably dispersing from Minnesota as they are known to disperse.  Tagged birds in Wisconsin dispersed hundreds of miles and they were known to even migrate back in the day.  This was just a single bird, and it flew in from the north.  I tried and failed to get a good picture.

Then three miles away, I tallied three crows on a carcass and three sharp-tailed grouse in a tree.  It was slow birding, but better than the day before and then I began to think.  Where could that guy's son even work?  I was in the middle of nowhere.  There isn't even a house on every six square miles.  A milk truck passed me as I was pulled off the side of the most major road in the area.  I looked at a starling, then it hit me.  A dairy!  There was a large dairy about a mile southwest of me.  Owls eat rats, dairies have rats.  Then I thought like an owl.  I've seen two snowy owls in trees, maybe 20 on fence posts.  One on a round bale, some on the ground, and on the ground with this snow would be nearly impossible to find, and a few on normal electrical poles.  The most I've seen in the Dakotas have been on the big transmission towers.  I could see way down behind me a new high transmission line, carrying power from a new windmill farm, the banes of the prairies, crossing the road behind me about two miles.  I stood out and followed it, wondering where it went.  I saw a mile south it turned and ran parallel of me heading west.  Most of the roads here are not passable in the winter, and are barely passable even in the summer.  No one plows them.  I drove down a mile past the dead end road that had the dairy on it and I found a pretty decent road and headed south.  I could see generally where the road was under the crusted snow and ice and crested a hill and could see the power line crossing ahead of me.

If I was an owl, I'd spend the day up there, hunt rats a mile over at night, and spend the day in solitude up on a tower.  Suddenly something big and white flew over ahead of my truck.  It was coming from the dairy.

BINGO!

It was Pearl.  It lit up on one of the towers and watched me watch it.

 

I had my Christmas Owl!

I left her where I found her, watching for voles and waiting for another after dark hunting raid on the diary.  She is providing valuable tracking data and hopefully having a good winter and staying off the roads so she can head back north in the spring and some year breed making more snowy owls.

So this is my present, thanks Pearl, all I want for Christmas ....is "you!"

My apologies to Mariah Carey

Merry Christmas Pearl and to all of you, it is time to go skating!

Olaf

Swift afoot

BIRD CHASES and RV trips are like a box of chocolate, you never know what you are going to get.  I can almost hear Forest, Forest Gump saying this.  Maybe it was just that I had spent a night near Bayou la Batre, Alabama recently.
             I had not chased a life-bird for North America since before New Years in 2018, the blackhawk up in Maine.  It had been over 10 months.  I had seen over 450 life world birds as a consolation, so I'm not complaining. There had been many quality and cool birds out there, but I had either been in the Southern Hemisphere or Europe, driving my RV, or been on the brink of some mandatory obligatory activity where I could not get away.  Most of these birds had been nowhere even near to me or been unchasable in Alaska.  
          I had contemplated chasing a green-breasted mango in South Texas that had been reported when we were in El Paso but it was only a one day wonder and by the time I got Big Bird my RV, to San Antonio no one was still reporting the hummingbird.  We continued heading east.  It was a bird I’d photographed in Roatan in February anyway and seen many many times. 

            Another bird I had seen in February, this one in Jamaica, was the Antillean palm swift and one of these had been reported in South Florida. It is hard to chase swifts, they don’t usually stick but this bird had arrived in the summer and been seen for a couple of weeks and then disappeared but in October, it had returned to Marathon about six miles away from its original location.  It was a code 5, and prior to this bird, only a pair that had shown up after a hurricane in the early Seventies had ever been reported.  It was a great bird but one I never planned on seeing but as we got closer to Florida I began to think…maybe?

            We came to Florida and immediately I chased a Florida Scrub-jay for my year list, it turned out Don and Nancy Harrington, of our Antarctica and Europe trips were camped a half mile away from us and he needed it as a life bird.  I had a guaranteed go to spot.  finding it took a few minutes.

            I talked to Don after we chased the scrub-jay and he was game for a real chase, and since I had nothing to do on Monday the day before we had to depart Florida albiet temporary, we took off on Sunday.  The plan was simple.  Stay in Florida City and meet Larry Manfredi the next morning, a local expert and a fun guy to bird with.  I could have probably found the bird easily myself, but I had been lazy to do any homework and I hadn’t seen Larry since 2016 and well, it is good to catch up with people.  Life is too short and one can lose track of people.

            We arrived at the golf course in Marathon about 9:30 on Veterans Day.  Standing out in the ruins of the front nine was a familiar face, Chris Feeney, a man who had spent a month getting great birds up in Alaska and seemed to have been everywhere in the last year, knocking his list up to over twenty more than me.  He was sitting on ABA 823 with two in the bank.  That was not including Hawaii.  Chris had never even birded the 50th state.  Larry called him and he hadn’t seen the bird yet that day.  He had bagged it the day before.

            So, we started looking.  It was basically finding a place with a good view and look for a quick bird that was not a swallow.  I saw my lifer mangrove skipper first.

Mangrove skipper

We switched locations and then there it was, lifer #802.  We saw the Cuban bird at distance for brief times and then met up with Chris Feeney and took a break for lunch.  It was after a really nice lunch.  Later, I had decided that I would rather hunt for butterflies when the swift made some passes that were almost too close.   

Antillean Palm Swift

It was a great bird, and this was much closer than I’d seen the bird in Jamaica, but I was 300 miles from my RV in Lutz and we had a 2000 mile trip to leave on in the morning.  It was also worth the trip to see some of the aftermath of Hurricane Irma.  This golf course had been severely hurt by the winds and the surge.  Palm trees were still topped and they had only opened half of the course.  The camping areas of nearby Long Key State Park had been destroyed and it looked nothing like the last time I had been there chasing a grassquit and a dove back in 2016.  It brought me back to St Martin and where I had started this writing project I was currently on.

We got to Lutz at 8 PM and after a night of sleep, I awoke, packed the car with a dog, closed the RV, rounded up two cats, and a wife, and we headed out.  Then thirty minutes later after we had realized we had forgotten cat food and circled back, we left again.  It was a beautiful 78 degrees, later ten miles north of the Georgia border, it was 58, by Atlanta it was 42, and in Nashville, it was now 26 degrees.  10 hours and a loss of 56 degrees.  They even had snow on the ground.  I began to wonder why we were leaving the south. 

The next morning, the hills of Tennessee gave way to the fields of Kentucky, but it was still a cold ride home, and there was even freezing rain by the time we got to Iowa.  I had only packed my sandals and well, my feet would have to toughen up before I could get home and find some shoes.  We stayed about a mile where my wife and I had lived in Evansdale, Iowa near Waterloo.  That was 22 years ago.  It had been an eventful two decades of life.  Lauren, out daughter, wasn’t even a thought when we lived in Iowa.  We were too busy with the twins.  I have always liked Iowa and driving US 20 that next morning was quite enjoyable.  I dropped Silja off in Sioux Falls to go to a concert with her book club.

I got home at four, let the pets out of the car, and then made a 45 miles sprint to our cabin to turn on the heat and hope the place hadn’t frozen up.  It had already been below zero and Enemy Swim Lake was frozen over.  I arrived at dusk and the temp inside was just 39 degrees, but luckily nothing had frozen inside as the warmer ground under the house had kept it above freezing.  The furnace fired up without problems. 

I came back home for the first time in 7000 miles and two months.  I was tired.  The TV and the internet were down.  I had no food in the house and all it seemed I had was a bottle of Ardbeg scotch.  I made do.  I drank a toast to a long journey and by 9 PM, I was asleep, exhausted.  It had been a long trek—a very long trek, but like the others this year, it was now over and soon another new one would begin. 

AFTER WE ARRIVED home for the first time in two months, we turned around after less than twenty four hours and drove the northwestern Wisconsin for my sister’s and my father’s birthday party.  As has been the trend lately, a family gathering includes cleaning out my beloved grandmother’s house.   Being a creature of the depression, she saved everything and also collected fine antiques.  One never knows what one might find or how it would move you.

            On a previous trip we found left over alcohol from the Seventies.  Cheap Phillips vodka from 1972 still tasted like old cheap vodka in 2019.  A case of Bruenig’s Beer from Rice Lake, Wisconsin (it closed in 1974) made us all laugh as I threw it out in the dumpster.  All of this was found hidden in grandma’s favorite hiding place for important artifacts.  Under thirty years of taxes, her prized pickles, was a box of deeds and all of this old booze.  I was afraid to even taste the sloe gin.  Does anyone even drink that these days?

            My family was always very well read for periodicals and newspapers.  For thirty years, two daily papers and at least six weekly newspapers were received at my grandparents house.  I believe every gardening magazine ever created was delivered monthly in care of my grandmother Lucille.  My grandfather read Fur, Fish, and Game religiously every month which was also the first magazine that ever published something I had written, a letter to the editor on sucker fishing.  If I desired a subscription to about any magazine, I would never have the request rejected.  I got everything from Outdoor Life to Time, the Sporting News to Sports Illustrated.  My friends in school also looked forward to me receiving my copy of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue which was banned at my high school for being too provocative.  I think I even sold one year’s copy to a fellow lusty teenager.  The results of all of this current events reading was my near mastery of current event competitions in school. The other result were stacks of old magazines and newspapers with stories that interested my grandmother stashed around.  Throwing away a magazine was something my grandmother didn’t like to do, especially a gardening magazine.

We were throwing out a pile of old Life and Look magazines from the Sixties when I came across a classic that got me to thinking a little.   Dated June 1962 was this issue with Marilyn Monroe on the cover.  I’m not sure, but this is probably her last cover ever while she was alive, as just a few weeks later, she would die from too many pills.  This story involves some outtakes from the movie Some like it hot.    A skinny-dip you’ll never see on the screen celebrates her nudity.  The article is suggestive as hell, but remember, Life was a family magazine and the pictures are pulled so that they don’t really show anything.  Probably like my old SI Swimsuit issue, I bet I could have sold this issue two decades later for a tidy sum, that is if I had found it.  I felt a little like I had missed an opportunity at commerce.  

            One thing that is proven by this magazine that even in 1962, nude recreation and nude activities fascinate readers.  Maybe it is just the thought of seeing a cheeky pose of Hollywood’s biggest starlet of the time, but in reality, it shouldn’t matter.  Marilyn Monroe was not the first person to swim naked, in fact, many years before this, swimming naked was the rule and not the exception.  Theodore Roosevelt would take a walk from the White House and jump in the Potomac for a dip.  I guess it was just that no one talked about it and it was especially true that no one brought with a camera.   Who would have been interested in a naked picture of our portly President?  Even today, typically, no one brings a camera or at least they shouldn’t. 

            My son wanted this magazine.  His interest was not for the movie icon or her shapely buttocks.  He is a Millennial.  “Marilyn who?”  He asked me.  Being the graduate student he was attracted by the article, Cancer may be infectious.  I don’t think that article is why this magazine is for sale on Ebay for prices that are above $50.00.

Olaf