After a wet steamy night it was really misty and overcast this morning. I very nearly considered a visit to the lake when I got up at 5:15. I never made it, feeding the cats, making my own breakfast etc etc etc. Kelly and I did take a short visit later in the morning before doing a little bit of shopping.
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| Wood Duck |
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| Bee on Common Milkweed |
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| Feeder Stream |
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| Memorial Lake |
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| Memorial Lake |
I took myself off a couple of hours up North to Ricketts Glen State Park as I haven't been up there for a while. It's scary in places, ridiculously easy to fall and break your neck or something equally important. The Glen Leigh trail was closed at one point because of storm damage washing away the trail. I don't know if it's because I'm a couple of years older or the Ganoga Glen trail has suffered storm damage itself. Anyway, I enjoyed my morning among the waterfalls and I got my heart rate up to 119 BPM at one point, I'm not sure whether that was due to the steep gradient and unevenness of the trail or simply because I was terror-stricken at the state of it. Anyway, I think I've made my last visit to Ricketts Glen, if I get the urge to see a waterfall in future I think I'll go to Niagara instead.😂😂😂
This time of year the Catalpa trees are in flower and they look lovely......until the flowers drop and turn brown. The smell is wonderful and they remind me of the Frangipani flowers of South East Asia, I might be wildly wrong as I haven't smelt a Frangipani in years.
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Catalpa Flower |
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| Catalpa Tree |
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| Catalpa Tree |
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| Flower Strewn Driveway the brown is from the shedding Yew trees. |
The last few days have curtailed my yard work somewhat as I certainly don't need to inhale the crap from the Canadian wildfires. At times the smell of burning wood is very noticeable; but today Thursday, it does seemed to have cleared a bit. All depends on the wind direction as we still have an air quality alert until Friday morning. I did take myself off up to Memorial Lake yesterday evening to see if I could get a few 'End of World' or 'Alien Invasion' shots of the sun going down. Not as nice as I'd hoped but you cant win them all.
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| Memorial Lake |
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| Memorial Lake |
This El Niño character has got a lot to answer for. It's too damn hot and dry for early June. Yesterday was 97F (36.11C) so not the sort of conditions to go walking round a nature reserve trying to take pictures. As for sitting in the blind in that heat, forget it. No, it was a day to take pictures inside. I took myself off to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg. If you ever saw the movie Witness with Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis, yeah that one, you remember that one, well it was filmed in and around Strasburg. Here's a few pictures I took during my visit.
I took myself off down to Delaware yesterday after learning about the Dupont Nature Center and seeing on their Webcam a lady sitting on a beach surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of shorebirds. Oh yeah, that's where I want to be. Heading down there it looked to be a slight hazy sky as dawn broke but it clouded over and was foggy in places by the time I arrived. When I got to the Dupont Nature Center it was high tide, cold, windy and with a heavy overcast. Not ideal for photography. I headed a little further South East to Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge. Being further inland it was out of the wind but I didn't stay long due to the hordes of blood sucking mosquito's. After a coffee stop I headed back to Dupont but was sadly disappointed when I asked how to get to where the lady on the webcam was.The answer was you can't. She was part of a Shorebird Monitoring Group and they go out by boat because you can't get there by foot. Damnit, foiled again. OK then, I headed up to Port Mahon where it was much better conditions other than the developing heat haze as the temperature rose. I carried on to Bombay Hook and walked the Boardwalk Trail hoping for close Seaside Sparrows and Marsh Wrens. By this time it was past noon and 85F (29.4C) and the heat haze was nasty along with the biting Green-headed Flies. I did manage to find a reasonably cooperative Marsh Wren, not very close but I'm reasonably pleased with the images. There were several stunning Summer plumaged Black-bellied Plovers but with the distance and the heat they're unusable, so I suppose it needs a still, cool early morning and loads of bug spray. Anyway, here's Wednesday's images in chronological/alphabetical order.
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Barn Swallow Dupont Nature Center. |
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| Great Black-backed Gull Dupont Nature Center. |
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| Ruddy Turnstone Dupont Nature Center. |
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| Ruddy Turnstone Dupont Nature Center. |
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| Ruddy Turnstone Dupont Nature Center. |
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| Willet Dupont Nature Center. (it does have two legs, honestly) |
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| Willet Dupont Nature Center. (it does have two legs, honestly) |
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| Royal Tern Port Mahon |
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| Willet Port Mahon |
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| Marsh Wren Bombay Hook |
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| Marsh Wren Bombay Hook |
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| Marsh Wren Bombay Hook |
