Trip Report: Lake of the Isles and Cedar Lake

This Sunday Kellie and I finally got our canoe out on the lake.  We rent a rack from the City of Minneapolis on the south side of Lake of the Isles.  On Sunday, we put in there, then cruised around the islands.  Then, we headed through the lagoon over to Cedar Lake.  The weather was quite good for fish viewing in the water and we saw many Bluegills below the water.  At one point, we also saw a nice big Northern or Muskie cruising along too.  We saw many fish that may have been largemouth bass based on the photos I've been able to dig up in a few minutes on the internet.

There were a couple of Common Loons out on the lake too, that came quite close to our boat!  We snapped a few pictures:

There was a also a tern flying about for a little while.  It didn't stick around long enough or come close enough for us to be able to ID it positively, but it was a big one, so I suspect it might have been a Caspian Tern.

In other large flying birds news, we saw and took pictures of a flying V of large birds overhead.  We could only see the silhouettes, but they seemed to be American White Pelicans!  They weren't geese or sandhill cranes, and what we could see of the silhouettes matched what you would expect from a Pelican.

We always see lots of turtles on Lake of the Isles and I'll have to get better at IDing them.  We definitely saw bunches of Painted Turtles.  There were also some turtles that had a knobby ridge down the middle of the shell.  The turtle ID site that I found indicated that the knobby ridge means that they were map turtles or false map turtles, of which we have three species in Minnesota.  I haven't had time to put more work into it to see if I could be more certain of the ID, but we'll definitely be back soon and hopefully see more and get some photos.