Pow-Wow Sunday in Naperville

Windy fall has arrived, for now anyway, following a modest thunderstorm Sunday night. But during the day, Sunday was warm and summerish. So the thing to do was go to a pow-wow in the western suburbs.

The event was at the Naper Settlement, an open-air museum in Naperville, Illinois, that features many old structures of the city, spared from destruction and gathered to the site in the last 40 years or so. It's been more than 10 years since I last went there, for an event of a different sort -- a Civil War re-enactment. I don't remember that they were doing any particular battle at the time, since there weren't any in this part of the country, just having a mock blue-and-gray fight.

We watched the Indian dancers for a while. The drumming had, sometimes, a hypnotic rhythm. And it's impossible not to admire some of the complicated regalia, which looked like a remarkable lot of work to put together and keep together. But after a while, we came to the conclusion -- at least I did -- that it's better to be a participant than a spectator during an event like this. So we wandered off and came face-to-face with birds of prey. Or, as they prefer to be called in these more enlightened times, raptors. Such as this one:

More about him tomorrow.