Some time before 7:30am, getting ready for today’s “Know Your Nature Neighbors” walk, I heard rain outside. “Guess you won’t be walking today,” my wife remarked. I checked radar. I looked outside at the steady rain. I tried to imagine the trails and whether they were getting muddy so that a group walk would damage them.
Figuring that we might have to confine our activity to the sidewalk and boardwalk, I arrived at the preserve and found that things were really in pretty good shape. Then Glenn arrived, followed by Annabelle. When Jan joined us, we headed for the south pond under light sprinkles. There were dragonflies to see and conversations to have about whether the Belted Kingfisher had been seen lately and if the Alligatorweed was really dying back. And there were the hundreds of circles appearing in the water as raindrops continued to fall from time to time.
A family was fishing from the pier, and one of the kids said, “Snapping turtle!” I turned and took a couple of photos as the turtle struggled with a hook in its mouth, and fortunately the turtle got free of the hook and fell back into the water. Those situations pose a real risk to turtles, especially if the line breaks (or the human cuts the line) and the hook remains stuck in its mouth.
I had documented the Common Snapping Turtle species at the preserve once before, but many visitors will never see one since they spend a lot of time under the water. So it was good to get photos of one, and especially to see it get away, probably without any significant injury.
We also spotted lots of dragonflies and talked about the one perched right off the pier with its wings pulled down and forward. It was a “Setwing,” which is a group of dragonfly species that typically perch with wings in that position. The nature app iNaturalist identified it as a Swift Setwing, which is great although I’ve never seen a living dragonfly that wasn’t swift.
In another spot a Blue Dasher was perched among the Cattails, and then back near the parking lot a Halloween Pennant was perched with those orange and dark brown banded wings.
By this time the clouds had dissipated and it was a beautiful, though muggy, day. The conversation was delightful, touching on the birds of the area (we saw a pair of Western Kingbirds, a Mississippi Kite, several vultures, Northern Cardinals, and others), trees and the vines growing up in them, and lots more. At the end, three of us walked up to the bluff and circled back down the boulder trail, re-positioning logs and rocks that someone had turned over. Turning things over and leaving them that way destroys the microhabitats that some of the smallest wild things depend on. I was really grateful for Glenn’s and Edgar’s help in repositioning some of those things.
If you get some naturalists together, it’s going to be a good time, rain or shine. Or both, which is how it went this morning. We’ll keep doing these walks, and we hope to see you on one of them.