Out for a Walk
April 8, 2023 – Day 52
We sat around much of the morning doing nothing because it was raining and windy, very windy. Remember how Susan put out the awning yesterday? Neither of us anticipated the winds coming but I was roused out of bed by the flapping of the awning. It can break from the wind so I went out to bring it in.
After that neither of us wanted to go outside. So we looked for driving things to do. The Blackwater Wildlife Refuge has a good driving loop, but that is almost 3 hours away! There isn’t much point in driving up and down Route 13 because we’re driving on that road on Monday.
Hiking seemed out of the question since it was so windy. We had hoped to rent some kayaks and kayak out to Kiptopeke’s Concrete Fleet, but it is too cold to kayak. (Kayaking in cold water and/or cold weather is a pretty dumb thing to do, cold shock can cause you to drown and if if you manage to not drown, hypothermia will get you quickly.) So here’s a photo taken by mattflowers of Atlas Obscura.
But we headed off to the Eastern Shore Of Virginia National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center to see what was there and do a short nature hike. We both were pretty sure that we wouldn’t see any birds because it was so windy and that’d we be back in the car in about 5 minutes. But we donned all our warm weather gear and headed out.
At the Visitor Center they had a list of birds recently seen, the Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher was in the area. We both mistakenly thought this was a life bird but that’s ok, it motivated us even more to walk down the cold & windy path.
It was a very pretty path!
We were both pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t windy in the woods. The wisteria vines were everywhere.
We soon came across the Winslow Battery which helped defend Chesapeake Bay during WWII. The gun that remains is from the USS Missouri.
Originally mounted in the rear gun turret of the USS Missouri, site of the 1945 Japanese surrender ceremony, this gun saw extensive action during WWII and the Korean. War. It “migrated” to the refuge in 2013 to represent the original gun that was mounted here. To honor the military history of the refuge, the 66.6-foot-long barrel was painted gray for the Navy and green for the Army.
Back on the path we were hearing lots of birds, Carolina Wren and the Carolina Chickadee were common. We could hear the Gnatcatcher but not see it.
We’re not sure what this vine was. It was probably Wisteria but so much of that was in bloom we can’t figure out why large parts were not, maybe they were just dead Wisteria
But blooming? The Wisteria is gorgeous!
We’re both pretty happy we went outside, the bad forecast wasn’t that bad after all.
Oh, about the birds. We did eventually see the Gnatcatcher but we were wrong, it wasn’t a life bird for us. But get this, when using Merlin Sound ID a common grackle flew overhead and it didn’t have the checkmark next to it. Now this is a pretty common bird on the East Coast, I can’t believe I never entered it into my list, so yay, a new life bird, the Common Grackle!