On the Way to Chincoteague

We made a weekend trek to Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge this past weekend.  There were so many photography opportunities that I will showcase them in several posts over the next few weeks. This post will focus on the trek to get there: leaving home early, crossing Maryland’s Bay Bridge, and making a stop at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge near Cambridge, Maryland.

We started our drive by 7:30 AM - being glad it was a weekend and there would be no rush hour traffic. The morning was quite cold. Many of the leaves in our neighborhood had fallen in the past week but the pines along this road early in our drive seemed to have protected the deciduous trees growing with them. 

The Bay Bridge is less than an hour along our route. I always try to take pictures as we are driving over. There were no closures so traffic on each span was going one way. Note that the bridges are not the same.

When we got to Blackwater - it seemed like it was going to be too cold for anything to be moving. We walked to the end of short boardwalk and nearly gave up.

Then we spotted the Great Blue Heron standing like a statue. Then it started to hunt for a snack. Not that the neck looks a lot thicker in the second picture. He had been successful in his foraging!

There were ducks too. These mallards look fat - or maybe it is just fluffed feathers. I liked the curls of their tail feathers.

At the end of the wildlife drive there were lots of pines and colorful leaves. There seem to be more sweet gum trees than I remembered from previous visits. The brochure for the refuge explained that they are challenged with rising water levels. What was once marsh has become - or is becoming - open water. Some forested area has become too marshy for the trees.

The visitor center has been renovated since we were at the refuge last (in June 2013) and there is a Monarch sculpture in the garden area behind it. My husband commented that it reminded him of the way the butterflies crowd together in Mexico to keep warm!

Osprey (Florida - November 2013)

I’m still savoring the trip to Florida last November. Ospreys are the thread I’m pulling today. There were a lot of them at the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.  Ospreys were easy to spot on the electric lines because they looked different than the other two birds that also enjoyed the high vantage point:

The ospreys were larger than the kestrels;

The white on their head and breast contrasted with the dark forms of the vultures.

The talons on these birds are large, like all raptors; they suit the life of the fish hawk - swooping down to grab fish from the surface of the water.

I had never seen ospreys before I moved to Virginia and Maryland. Thirty years ago they were not as numerous as they are now. The parks that were near marshy areas provide nesting platforms for them…and occasionally there is one with a nest. When we went to Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge last May there was one with a nest (with eggs or chicks because the bird stayed at the nest and a mate came to help with other birds were approaching too close.