On Friday afternoon, I went to check out the O.D. von Engeln Preserve. This Nature Conservancy property has some interesting glacial formations and a variety of habitats, including a bog, which as I understand it is pretty unusual for this area. I don't get many chances to explore bogs, and I very much enjoyed the path through this part of the preserve:
The bog was filled with big and beautiful flowers from the Purple Pitcher Plant (Sarracenia purpurea). How does one plant get to eat bugs and have such amazing blooms?
These are some weird flower structures -- fitting, I suppose, for a plant as strange as a pitcher plant:
In another part of the preserve, this small Garter Snake was basking in a sunny patch on the forest floor:
I'm hoping to return to this place in the coming months to see what other interesting flowers might show up. Bogs are fun!
This morning, Paul and I went for a walk at the Roy H. Park Preserve, where we met this creature on the path:
A little Common Snapping Turtle! It's got the long tail and spiked shell of a snapper, but it's just a baby monster as yet:
Hello, little monster, you are very cute:
This morning's walk also featured a singing Blackburnian Warbler and Indigo Bunting (both too far away for my camera), and a small American Toad crossing the path:
I love that it's the time of year when reptiles and amphibians are common, and new wildflowers are appearing seemingly all the time. Summer is on its way!
Up until this past Saturday, it had been probably over a year since I last saw wild turtles. We never saw the one species of turtle in northwestern California while we were living there, and despite many walks around ponds, wetlands, and streams since moving to New York in July, there's still been a surprising lack of turtle sightings. But on Saturday morning, I visited the Cornell Plantations Arboretum, and apparently the ponds here are where all the turtles live.
Some children and their families were there tossing what looked like cereal into the water, and dozens of turtles were eagerly snatching up the food right along with the fish. There were lots of Painted Turtles, and, crazily enough, two huge Common Snapping Turtles right in the middle of it all:
I've never seen snapping turtles acting so much like fish, or like other turtles for that matter. What are these monsters doing casually swimming around in the light instead of lurking in some corner?
Easy food is a powerful motivator I guess. In any case, I loved getting to see these creatures' algae-covered faces:
Yikes, what a wonderful monster:
The Painted Turtles were also lovely, of course, with their beautifully patterned shells:
While the turtles fed in one area of the pond, big tadpoles in another part of the pond kept swimming up to the surface (to grab a morsel of something while the pond's predators were otherwise engaged?) then diving immediately back down into murky water. Those tadpoles were too quick for my camera, but some young Bullfrogs perched on waterlily pads were easier (and very handsome) subjects:
I was sure I'd find turtles sooner or later, but I'm glad I got to see such an impressive group before summer starts to wind down!
Well, they've finished filming that giant-fish-eating-people movie at Naugatuck State Forest! I made my return to those woods this morning, and except for a few tire tracks, you'd really never know a film crew was set up there for weeks. I was pleasantly surprised at how unchanged the place was, actually. Go film crew!
Anyway, the place was just as awesome as always, with lots of wildlife out and about. That thing happened where I got stuck standing in one spot for half an hour, because a constant stream of various birds just would not stop passing through. This time, that spot was on a little bridge over a stream, with tall conifers on one side and small leafy shrubs on the other, and birds were going crazy all over.
Among those birds was this sweet little Northern Waterthrush -- a type of warbler -- who sat bobbing its tail in the brush over the stream and chirping at me:
I've seen Louisiana Waterthrushes in these woods a few times before -- they look very similar to Northern Waterthrushes, but have brighter white eyebrows and an unstriped throat -- but this is my first time seeing this species. The close view made the encounter extra cool.
And another awesome bird was climbing up and down the tree trunks nearby -- a Red-breasted Nuthatch:
Red-breasted Nuthatches appear year-round in Connecticut, but they're much less common than White-breasted Nuthatches, and I'd never seen any around here at all until I happened to spot a few passing through the trees in our yard a couple of weeks ago. I'm so used to seeing White-breasted Nuthatches, and these birds are quite dainty in comparison -- they're just as talkative, though! And after years of never seeing Red-breasted Nuthatches, of course, I saw them several times during today's walk. :P
Update 9/13/12: According to this post from the Connecticut Audubon Society's blog, we're currently experiencing an irruption of Red-breasted Nuthatches in Connecticut, meaning that (for whatever reason) there are many more of these birds in the area now than there have been in previous years. That would definitely explain why I'm seeing them now when I'd never seen them before!
I'm kind of in love with these birds, actually, and I wish I could meet them more often. I think their stripey heads are very cool looking, from any angle:
I hope to see you around again someday, little bird!
While watching the birds in this spot, I got distracted by some other things in the trees, too. This moth was doing a pretty good job at camouflage, and I think it's a type of underwing, so it probably could've broken its cover pretty dramatically if it had wanted to:
Higher up, an active paper wasp nest hung from another tree -- I could see the wasps going in and out, and I was glad that I was down on the ground:
I have one last sight from today's walk to share. Is that rock moving?
This location for the film suddenly seems appropriate, because there's definitely something lurking under the water. Two somethings, in fact!
It'd better be two, actually -- not even considering the two heads in the previous picture, I'd rather not consider the possibility of a Common Snapping Turtle this big:
(Really, though, I'm pretty tickled by these two snapping turtles hanging out together. They seem like such solitary creatures, and I love the idea of snuggling snappers.)
Hooray for a fun woods walk, as summer comes to a close.
There were monsters in the woods today.
I'll start with the lesser of the two monsters I saw -- monstrous because of its size more than anything else:
This Bullfrog was at least 5 inches long -- not the biggest Bullfrog ever, but certainly the biggest I've seen in these lakes. This frog was totally confident in its command of the lake, refusing to hop away even after all of its smaller cousins dove underwater at my approach. OK, so it's maybe more impressive than scary (and I want to give it a hug, actually).
This next creature, though, lurking just a few feet away from the Bullfrog, is a monster fitting the title of this post. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have nightmares after looking so closely at this thing:
Is that a stick poking out of the water? Hardly, although that's what I thought at first. I actually started taking pictures of this thing because I liked the novelty of a stick that looked so much like it had an eye... and nostrils... and an open mouth.... It took me a little while to figure out that the "stick" was alive -- the decisive clue was that it was slowly sinking below the surface of the water as I got closer, only to resurface again after I'd sat still for a few minutes.
I find this picture deeply creepy, maybe because that eye looks so human to me.... I can't think of what else this could be besides a Common Snapping Turtle, and it must be a huge one -- that part of the head sticking above the water alone was at least as big as the giant Bullfrog. There were fish swimming around nearby, probably unaware of the presence of that gaping mouth.... *shiver*
But it wasn't all monsters today, thankfully. I was excited to see this Common Loon in the middle of one of the lakes -- this is my first time seeing one in Connecticut, and the only other times I've encountered loons has been on trips to the Far North (i.e., Maine). I couldn't resist showing this teeny picture -- the loon was so far away, but still so cool.
And the wildflowers are really starting to come up. This is the part of the post where I just throw out a bunch of pictures with quick descriptions. Ready? Here we go! :P
This is an Azure Bluet (or just "Bluets", Houstonia caerulea), so dainty and pretty. Apparently this plant is supposed to grow in clumps, although I only saw this one flower.
Here's Coltsfoot, a plant that sends up its bright yellow flowers before it opens up its leaves. I just learned that Coltsfoot is not native to North America, and it's actually listed as invasive and "banned" in Connecticut -- does that mean that you can't bring new plants into the state, or are they trying to eradicate the plants that are here? I haven't done enough research to have an answer to that question.
This is a Wood Anemone. I've been seeing the tiny buds of these plants in the woods for a while now, but they just burst into bloom today -- what pretty, luminous flowers.
And here's one of my happiest discoveries of today, a patch of Wild Strawberries in bloom. This plant is being visited by a Cabbage Butterfly (I think). I was trained to dislike Cabbage Butterflies when I was little, because they're invasive and the caterpillars are really hard on garden plants -- but if this guy is going to help pollinate the strawberry plants and create delicious fruit (and I mean delicious, way better than cultivated strawberries in my opinion), then I say go for it.
Oh good, with all those flower pictures, I've almost forgotten about the Snapping Turtle already. Except that I just reminded myself of it. Yikes, those eyes....
