On the way to work this morning, a wild turkey crossed the road in front of me. I stopped the car, grabbed my camera, and looked for its tracks. I found a few, but they were faint. I took a few pictures, but none of them turned out very well. I may have to sketch and scan rather than use photos, or maybe see if I can do the sketching on my computer.
I took another lunchtime walk, this time with the express intent of photographing those pigeon tracks. It was a wasted effort. I guess I took a dozen pictures, and not one of them turned out well enough for use in the Animal Tracking honor. I turned off flash, but that made the pictures blurry. I tried manual settings, but I just couldn’t hold the camera still enough. I might hafta draw these too!
On the way home I stopped by the Merrimack River in Canterbury. There used to be a functional bridge crossing the river there, but it no longer has a deck. My GPS thinks it’s still a valid route though, and it’s alway trying to send me into the drink. I parked the car and walked down to the river bank looking for flowers and tracks. I found a new-to-me flower (mabe it’s forget-me-not?) and several tracks: chipmunk and coon, and two kinds of bird. The large bird tracks were undoubtedly made by a great blue heron. I have no idea what made the smaller ones. And wouldn’t you know it, I already have decent pictures of all of those.
When I got home, I ate dinner and then took the dog outside. I was raining lightly, but she didn’t care. There was plenty of thunder in the background too. I checked the burned stump, and the bright yellow slime mold I wrote about yesterday was creamy yellow – just like the first photo in that series. I’ll keep an eye on it and see how long it cycles. We came in just in time, and the sky opened up. Fifteen minutes later that was over. So Beth and I took Penny for a walk down to Sandogardy Pond. I saw that the Kalmia angustifolia, Nuphar lutea and the Dianthus armeria were still blooming, so I logged those when I got home. That white lily was also still blooming, but I still haven’t got a positive id on that.
On the hike back to the house Beth was wanting to know what games I played when I was a kid: Hide and seek, tag, baseball, hockey, bike riding, Monopoly, Risk, basketball. She asked me where people hid when we played hide and seek, and the one I remember most fondly was when Dad was playing with us. My friend Wally was “it”, and Dad thought it would be funny if we all hid in the camper on the back of his truck. We piled in, and Dad locked the back door. When Wally found us, he locked the back door from the outside and then went around to the front to start tagging us with the Nerf football (that’s how we played – tagging with the ball vs with a hand was a lot more fun). Dad opened the window, and tore the screen out! To my 12-year-old mind, that wa just awesome! He would have killed us if we had done that!
