Great C&O Canal Walk and Critter Sightings!

Had a wonderful walk along the C&O Canal Sunday with my girlfriend. Beautiful wintry day, and several delightful surprises!

(Note: click on an image to enlarge it.)

The first bit of excitement was a small hawk zooming across the towpath directly in front of us and perching in a tree overlooking the river. As regular readers have probably figured out by now, I'm a bit of a nut on raptors, so this was very cool. Based on the size and markings, from the quick glimpse of him flying, I guessed it to be a Sharp Shinned Hawk. Another walked speculated it might have been a Kestrel Falcon, but I didn't think so. Based on the photos I took of it perched, and looking at bird books and websites, I think we were both wrong. The hawk had a long tail, common to both Kestrels and Sharpies, but the rounded tip shown in this photo isn't typical of the Sharpie, and the lack of any russet tones rules out the Kestrel.

So what was it? At the moment, I'm leaning toward either a small/young Cooper's Hawk (which does have a rounded tail), or a Merlin, a slightly bigger relative of the Kestrel, without the russet coloration. The Cooper's is far more common, but this bird was rather small for a Cooper's. Anyone else want to chime in? This photo was taken with a 12x zoom, and then cropped heavily to feature the bird. The original and a couple of other shots are at:

C&O Canal, Jan 30, 2011

The next fun thing was the canal being frozen hard enough for my girlfriend to try out her "new" skates! These were bought for all of $7 at a local thrift store, and look virtually brand new. I don't have any skates, so I basically just slid around on my boots, and watched and cheered as she and her dog zoomed around the ice. Such fun!

We were out in the afternoon, from around 3:30 to 6:30, and the light was just amazing. And we saw a beautiful sunset too boot. On the return walk, we had three other wonderful surprises... First from far off we got to watch a red fox trotting about the ice in the area known as Widewater. He appeared and disappeared several times, seeming to hide among the small rocky islands in the basin there. Suddenly, he made a decision and set out across the ice, ultimately climbing the bank and vanishing into the woods on "our" side of the canal.

A little while after that, we startled a great blue heron, which took off with a mighty flapping of wings, circling around to finally sail off over the river ahead of us. It was nearly dark by then, so we were at least as surprised as the heron was. Really amazing to see it rise from the dark waters and fly into the darkening sky.

Finally, as we were nearing our starting point, and the sun had been down quite a while, we both stopped, transfixed... at first I thought I was hearing things... or mistaking something for a sound I haven't heard in a very long time. But no, we both stopped and listened, and there was no mistaking the sound of a large pack of coyotes, on the far (Virginia) bank of the Potomac, singing their eerie song! The last time I'd heard that sound was when I lived in Flagstaff, AZ, about a decade ago, and it was surprising, exciting, and a little chilling to hear it here. There's just something so wild and strange about their call... I remember being alone in a tent, far back in the Coconino National Forest, and hearing that sound. It's really like nothing else you've heard.

Check this link for some audio clips and info on coyotes:

http://www.junglewalk.com/popup.asp?type=a&AnimalAudioID=720

And:

http://www.kwic.com/~pagodavista/coyote.wav

for a direct link to a recording of coyotes.

All in all, a wonderful, beautiful walk, and a delightful day. Made all the better by a hot meal and a quiet evening talking about it afterwards.

More photos:

C&O Canal, Jan 30, 2011

Summer Evenings!

I've been lucky to have the chance to enjoy some lovely summer evenings of late... Last night, on my way home, I stumbled upon our local "Concerts on the Green" event, and listened to a fun bluegrass group as the evening cooled things down. Families on blankets and lawn chairs, some other folks with bikes... even a couple of our customers with their tadpole trikes. A classic summery event.

And tonight I enjoyed a walk along our local rail trail and was treated to another installment of the Amazing Firefly Display! I don't know if they are actually more active or abundant this year, but it sure seems that way. I've had a number of walks lately graced with the luminous display of these amazing little critters. Magical.

All the while, whenever I'm outside in the evening these days, it seems the air is filled with frog song. One of my favorite sounds of summer!

So, where you grew up, was it "firefly" or "lightning bug?" I recall both, but I can't be sure which was New York and which was Maryland. Hmmmmm...

Signs of Spring!

After an unusually snowy winter here in the DC area, this week we are seeing sustained signs that spring is here!

At the shop, folks are coming in with their bikes, in the time honored tradition of everyone remembering they own a bike in the same narrow window of time. We went from a virtually empty repair ticket board to one that's chock full of tickets, with turnaround time for most repairs now about a week and a half. Ah, if only some of these people had thought to bring their bikes to us in January or February.

In other realms... tiny traces of green appeared, then blossoms... overnight the forsythia outside door went from bare to glorious gold about a week ago. The first signs of spring leaves are cropping up on the branch tips.

And tonight, I extended my ride home, to take in a couple of marshes and the strident song of spring peepers! Mixed in were a couple other species of frogs or toads... I need to look up what they were sometime, since I don't know all the calls. And a Fowler's toad hopped away in my headlight beam as I rolled down the path. Finally, as I was headed home, a red fox hesitated, then bolted across my path, disappearing into the brush.

A lovely night.

Ahh... spring.

Pretty walk home this evening

Just a lovely evening... crisp air, a crescent moon in a bright sky, and I spotted a Cooper's Hawk swoop into a tree just ahead of me at one point. I stopped and watched him for a minute, then he suddenly took off. As I followed him with my eyes, I saw another, smaller Cooper's coming from the other direction. They both made arcing turns to fall into parallel flight, then flew away into the darkening sky. Beautiful! Perhaps a mating pair, since the second one was noticeably smaller than the first.

Oh, and before you drive yourself crazy looking for the hawk in the picture above, he's not there. This is just a nice shot of the moon through the branches of a tree that I shot a few minutes later.

Snowshoes!

Yep, I did it. I bought myself a pair of snowshoes. I'd heard over the years from various folk how much fun they were, but never felt any great drive to buy a set here in the mid-Atlantic, where heavy snows are pretty rare. Then back in December we had a big storm... dropped around 20" here, which is a lot for us. And the first day I walked in to work after the storm, I saw a pair of women zooming along on their snowshoes as I slogged through the snow in my regular boots. It looked really fun... but geez, "there's no way we'll get another snow like this this winter" I thought.

Well, um... we did! As you know if you live here, or if you've followed my blog. In fact in February we've gotten something around a total of 30" of snow, all in the space of a week. So as that series of storms was descending upon us, I decided to give it a shot and ordered a pair of snowshoes online. There were a few snags along the way... but yesterday around noon, there they were, thanks to UPS! So I decided to waste no time and headed out to try them out on... you guessed it, my beloved C&O Canal!

What a blast! It's an amazing sensation to be out in deep snow and to be able to walk ON it, instead of sinking deep and having to slog through it. It's all about surface area, I suppose, and these suckers have plenty of that. Sizing of snowshoes is based on weight, so for me a 30" x 9" snowshoe is the best choice. They look huge but once they're on, they're really not ungainly. Maybe it's because I read and heard many warnings, but I really didn't ever feel like I was having to work hard to avoid tripping on my own feet. I'd heard that was one of the adjustments you have to make, essentially adopting a wider than normal stance, but I didn't really have to think about it. Perhaps my mind and body compensated unconsciously, or perhaps I naturally walk a little bowlegged (I'm suddenly reminded of a recent Prairie Home Companion "Lives of the Cowboys" sketch... but I digress!). Either way, I found it easy and natural to walk in them.

And what a gorgeous day! A little chilly, but not windy, and while it was mostly overcast, it was still lovely to be out in the snow in solitude. I think the whole two plus hours I was out I saw exactly two people, both on skis. The towpath was covered in snow, as were some parts of the canal, and the woods to either side wore it like a soft white blanket. View of the river were as always spectacular, and the water itself was an amazing shade of green. There were a lot of ducks out and about, and a couple of kingfishers (skittish birds!), and a fair number of deer. I managed to get a few good pictures of the deer, and even some nice shots of the ducks. Even the trees were remarkable, with their branches and trunks standing out in dark contrast to the snow.



Take a look at the flickr album Feb 17, 2010 Snowshoeing on C&O Canal to see more shots, including a series of closeups I took of the severed end of a large, fallen tree branch. A surprisingly beautiful thing.

Last Canal Walk of 2009?

Probably. It's not likely I'll be on the C&O Canal again before the new year.

I won't use a lot of words here. Suffice to say it was a cold and breezy and wonderful walk. Many birds, different ones now... we're into the season of juncos and titmice. Also saw a beautiful red-tailed hawk and a pileated woodpecker. I'm always taken aback by just how big those pileated woodpeckers are.

Photos from today are at:

December 29, 2009, C&O Canal

My Left Foot

No, not the amazing movie with the spectacular performance by Daniel Day Lewis... I'm referring to my actual left foot. Ordinarily I wouldn't share photos of my feet... they're not my best feature, being generally big and bony. But today the left one is rather impressively swollen and red, due to a bee sting on Sunday. And it got me to thinking about my history with stinging insects, as this is the worst reaction I've yet had.

I was stung by yellowjackets on two different occasions as a small child, both times before I had reached my sixth birthday. Those two stings left a powerful impression on me, giving me a pretty strong fear of all stinging insects for all of my childhood, through adolescence and on into my adult life. Among other things the incidents persuaded me that the "don't bother them and they won't bother you" theory was, well, hooey. In the first case, I was performing the highly provocative act of carrying a stick of firewood (okay, maybe the little beast was on the stick and I disturbed it, but to my four year old mind I was innocent), and in the second I was stung while eating breakfast during my family's "summer of perpetual camping" that I will write about soon.


(The photo to the right is me with my big brother, Stephen, near the site of the first sting, no doubt before it occurred, because I think I look pretty happy in this shot... as near as I can tell from an old photo)


Anyway, I slowly got over my fear, helped in part by being stung a couple of times as an adult and realizing that some of the perceived agony was filtered through a child's mind. Not that being stung in the armpit while driving my VW bus at 70mph (yes, they can go that fast, on a good day) in North Dakota was fun... it just wasn't as traumatic as my childhood stings.

Then an exciting new development appeared... in my late 20s, I was stung in the leg by a yellowjacket on my honeymoon (ironically, this paled in comparison to the winch accident that put me in the emergency room on my wedding day, but I digress). It hurt like heck, but after a half an hour or so, the pain subsided and I went about enjoying a wonderful trip with my new wife (now ex-wife). The weird part was when my leg began to puff up and get very sore and red a couple of days later. I was told at the time that in dry seasons like we were having, wasp venom often is more potent, and that was probably why I had this reaction. It sounded reasonable to me, and I wasn't stung again for quite some time, so I didn't dwell on it.

Well, in the last 5+ years since I've moved back to the east coast, I've been stung a number of times by both honeybees and yellowjackets, and the pattern of owie!-pain subsides-swelling/red/itch appears began to reliably repeat itself. I didn't really think to hard about it, but I did notice that generally the yellowjackets cause the most severe reactions, and honeybees just caused minor swelling and itching a day or so after the sting. My sister's a nurse, and said it was just a mild allergic reaction, but to keep an eye on it and if it got worse, talk to a doctor.

So, this time around, I got stung on Sunday morning, and went through the usual swearing and swatting phase, then the dang-this-hurts phase, followed by the now-it's-not-so-bad phase followed by the huh-it's-swelling-a-little-sooner-than-usual phase.... followed by they damn-I-would-swear-I'm-running-a-fever phase... WHOA! Now that was a new one for me! My teeth were literally chattering from chills on a warm summer night, a sure fired sign I have a fever, along with the general aches and oogy feelings.

Which prompted me to take my first ever sting-induced trip to a doctor today. Where, after the absolute minimum of time and attention (gotta love American health care), I was told it was probably just a more severe, but still not serious (as in Epi-Pen serious) allergy. With maybe a tiny infection too. So I was prescribed prednisone and an anti-biotic I'm not even going to try to spell. And told to take Zyrtec as an antihistamine and ibuprofen as a pain killer in the future, both of which I knew already. I'm going to get a physical soon and discuss this further with a doctor who spends more time with me, but maybe it's just no big deal. But take a look at that foot... kinda scary if you saw that at the end of your leg, from a tiny little insect sting, no?

Anyway, I'll be just as happy to not have a yard with so much clover in it in the future. :-)

Twins!

Well, tonight they were both there on the deck... two little baby possums, chowing down on cat food and apples.

Amazing little critters.

A Haven for Critters

First it was a bird feeder. Then another. And you know, gold finches like special food...

And that doesn't take into account the domesticated critters... our two cats... and we have in the past also had gold fish and parakeets.

But last night, it was particularly funny... no sooner had Annie managed to shoo out the possum yet again (we forgot to close the door), when I glanced down at our dish rack in the kitchen... to find a young Praying Mantis perched on a canning jar! Take a look there to the left.

He was safely escorted outside and released back into the wild. We wouldn't have it any other way.

More Yard Wildlife

Or... "Living With Squirrels"!

Thanks in large part to our generous feeding of the local bird population (including, indirectly, the feeding of the local hawk population, as noted in earlier posts), our yard is visited by a prodigious number of squirrels. It's not unusual to look out and see 4, 5, or even 6 (or more) squirrels cavorting about the yard, feasting on the birdseed that spills on the ground. And as the photo to the right shows, sometimes the birdseed in the feeders!

Now, lots of folks object strenuously to such activity, but Annie and I just can't seem to be bothered by it. The way I figure it, what makes birds more worthy of feeding than squirrels? I'm not going to start setting up feeders specifically for them, mind you... it's just that I can't see going to the extreme lengths some people go to to rid their yards of squirrels. And honestly, do any of the things people do really work? Squirrels are so industrious and clever (and stubborn) that they seem to find ways around everything.

What brought them to mind tonight though, is a pair of squirrel incidents that happened today. This morning, I happened to glance out the window and saw a squirrel on his hind legs, reaching up to grab at the head of a sunflower that has started to arch over toward the ground. He's reach up, grab a seed, and let it go while he munched on his snack.. then reach up and repeat the whole process. I'd never seen one do that before, and it was pretty funny.

Even funier was the sight Annie was treated to a little while later. She saw a squirrel bounding across the lawn with something rather large and odd-looking in his mouth. It took her a moment to realize that it was the entire head of a giant sunflower! Apparently, in addition to the trick I witnessed, the squirrels have figured out how to pull the heads down and sever them from the stalk! Which explains why several of our sunflowers appear to have been decapitated. Not a big deal... most of the sunflowers in our yard are "volunteers" (see earlier post and photo) that sprung up thanks to the birdseed. But it does show you to what lengths a squirrel will go for food.

Determined Critter

Well, one of my readers warned me about the persistance of possums.... and he was right!

We've been closing the door at dusk generally, but the other night we forgot. When Annie went out to the back room to shut it, look what she found... our little furry visitor perched on the edge of the big container of cat food! We're not always good at screwing the lid down tight, and she figured that out. Once she realized she was spotted, she hunkered down under a shelf unit, and it took a lot of time and some judicious use of the broom again to get her out.

We're a lot better about closing the door in the evening now!

Stubborn little critter, huh?

Critters

I ride to and from work on a rail-trail... one of those multi-use paths that use a former railroad right of way. It makes for a nice ride, in part because of the flora and fauna along the trail, especially at this time of year.

One treat this year has been the discovery of a fox den not far from the trail. I was tipped off to it by another rider who comes into our shop a lot, and I now have been lucky enough to see both mama fox and her three kits on several occasions.

Yesterday was the best so far though. I was riding home around dusk, nearing the area where the den is, when I suddenly realized all three kits were frolicking right beside the trail, and in fact stepped onto the pavement at one point. I stopped and watched for a minute or two, and it was delightful. Clearly they were playing... chasing each other and wrestling and jumping on one another. At one point, a pair of runners passed within 5 feet of them, totally oblivious to the kits! I guess they were too wrapped up in their training or whatever. I don't understand that... I always pay attention to my environment, and notice the little things, even when riding along at a good clip. Guess I'm just not totally focused on the "fitness" side of things.

Anyway, the kits eventually retreated back to the relative safety of the brush, but were still visible from the trail as I rode off. I was both grateful for the chance to see them, and concerned at their lack of fear of humans. That usually doesn't turn out well for animals. And I have to wonder where mama fox was all that time. Seems odd that she wouldn't have kept them out of sight with so many people still around. I think about a half dozen folks passed by in the short time I was there. I hope those little guys do okay.

On another note, my cat Tybalt had his annual checkup and vaccinations today. As usual he cried all the way to and from the vet, and the whole time he was in the waiting room. He just doesn't see much of other people or places, so it kind of freaks him out. The vet was very gentle and patient with him though, so it went well. And he's got a clean bill of health! Woo hoo!