Walking on the dike

Hello,

One of my yoga friends does some work for the conservation people. She makes observations. I do not totally understand that, but she knows some good places to go see nature at its finest. This morning after yoga, three of us headed off to some little know wetlands.

As we started on the dike Meg commented, “Look out for ticks.”

Basically I paid little attention to that as I think it is too early for ticks to be functioning.

We quickly saw ducks and some geese. At the side there was much evidence of beavers working some time ago. They had dropped a number of trees. I could not figure out why they would do that and just leave them. It did not seem like typical animal activity. Meg said, “Notice that there are no branches on the trees. It is probably because they have eaten the smaller more tender twigs.”

Then it was on to the blue heron rookery. There were no birds flying around this area so we thought we would not disturb them. Meg noticed some blue heron flying from the other side of the dike. “They might have moved their rookery,” she speculated.

Sure enough we saw them going to partially leaf hidden nests in a dead tree beyond us. They flew in gracefully and sat on or by the nest for a short time before they departed. I took pictures, but I cannot see either nest or birds even though I know they were there. Isn’t it great that our eyes work as well as they do?

On the walk back going into a head wind we saw a small animal run out of the trees in a distance, then it was followed by several deer and another small animal. Meg, after considering a bobcat or cougar, identified the smaller animal as a coyote. It stopped and looked back at some more deer following it. She thought we were scaring them even though we were a good distance from them.
On the drive home Meg found at least five crawling ticks in her hair or on her arm. She then reported that the reason she had talked about ticks at first was because one was making its way up her pant leg.

At home I did a strip search with the help of Leroy. He found one on the back of my thigh. Creepy!

Here are the pictures that I took.
http://picasaweb.google.com/psbradway/Birds2010Spring#

Paula