December's here

Only minutes into my normal "clockwise" walk I was happy to scare up a doe. It was a strange area of the park to see a deer in, being very close to a large open area surrounded by neighborhood roads. She was skittish probably because of the area and I barely got one pic before she bounded away. There was just a hint of snow/frost on the ground and it made for a loud, crunchy walk on the woodchip trails.

The sun was shining, making the snow sparkle so I tried taking a close up of the white stuff on a fallen log. After spotting a deer so early on my walk I was hopeful to see more but unfortunately the rest of my walk was quiet and cold. Plants that had still been hanging on to their green color are getting scarcer and becoming brown, dried up, brittle versions of themselves.

While crossing the baseball diamonds on the east side, the snow had collected in the lower areas of the gravel, revealing a cluster of kid's drawings. They reminded me of petroglyphs or ancient cave drawings as they would have been near impossible to even notice without the snow.

Fall migration

Well, the sun was nowhere to be seen today finally making it feel more like a typical, late-November day. Still haven't seen a single deer in about 3 weeks now. Wonder where the heck they are. After coming out of the woods on the east side, a fellow park goer and I both stopped to watch and listen to an extremely loud commotion of Canadian Geese. About 5 separate flocks came from every direction and seemed to meet up directly above us making one giant flock. I'm guessing there must have been about 130 or more total making quite a noise. I tried to get a photo but they trailed out so long that I just couldn't capture them all. Nothing else was moving after that and I barely had any good reasons to pull out my camera save for this cluster of hard tree-mushrooms.

Preparing for winter

Gettin' a little colder lately -in the mornings anyway- and just not much to see for wildlife. The sun is still shining though creating some interesting scenery as the park prepares for winter. The same pond with all the ducks last Sunday was just barely frozen over today. Cattails are exploding everywhere now and it's tough to find one that's not seeding out. Their cotton-like seeds are clinging to everything and near the south side of the park the underbrush looks like it's been coated in freshly fallen white snow. The only critter I saw this day was a muskrat. He was sitting on a floating log where the creek drains back out of the main bodies of water. I'll have to check back to see if he is building his winter home in the same area.

Wood Duck

The woods are really starting to thin out now and you can see much further through the trees. Things that I've never noticed before are now in plain sight like this huge beehive just a few feet off the wood chip trail. Not much wildlife seen this day but at one of the small ponds near the baseball fields I spotted this big group of Ducks. There in the middle was just one male Wood Duck among about 25 other Mallards. I didn't think they associated with each other but apparently they do. The Wood Duck however was constantly being harassed by a few of the Mallards. As they chased him back and forth, the whole group just getting closer to me so I snapped a ton of pictures. The fairly sunny sky really showed off his bright colors and iridescent green-blue-purple head. After a while he ended up only just feet from me.