On the Boardwalk

After our boat tour into the Okefenokee, we decided to walk the 0.75-mile boardwalk back to the observation tower.  Okefenokee is really not a swamp at all, but a massive peat bog, and along the boardwalk we saw plentiful Sphagnum moss as well as a few pitcher plants, which are carnivorous.  In a bog the soil tends to be acidic and nitrogen-poor, and carnivorous plants compensate for the lack of nutrients in the soil by trapping and digesting insects.

We looked for Pileated Woodpeckers, because my mother has never seen one, but though we heard them calling and saw the cavities they’d excavated in dead trees we never spotted one.

Finally we reached the tower…

…and at the top we found not a long-haired princess but a birdwatcher from Chicago on vacation with his family.  Like almost every birder I’ve met, he was eager to point out to us the birds he was looking at (and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was no way that distant raptor could be a Snail Kite, as we were too far north).  He gave us a tip about where to look for Sandhill Cranes on our way back…

…and what a pair they were, with their magnificent lack of concern for the humans admiring them and photographing them and talking quietly.  Get a load of that yellow eye!

As we walked back, we could hear baby alligators chirping to their mama and Brown-headed Nuthatches calling their squeaky-toy calls in the pines overhead.  Not, overall, a bad way to spend a Sunday.

Into the Swamp

My parents were visiting from Arizona this weekend and today we paid a visit to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.  Because it is a swamp, it is best seen from the water, and our first order of business was to take a boat tour.  The weather could not have been more beautiful – in the seventies with sunshine and no biting insects to speak of – and there were alligators everywhere.

Okefenokee is the largest National Wildlife Refuge (and one of the largest areas of wilderness) in the eastern U.S.  The area that’s accessible on a day trip like this is a tiny margin on the edge of a vast wetland explorable only by canoe or kayak, and populated by no one but birds and reptiles.  I love knowing that such emptiness is so close by.

As always, click for larger views.  The water, the plants, the buttressed cypress trees on every side, the sunshine and the song of eye-smartingly yellow Prothonotary Warblers…  I would say more but the photos stand on their own.  More to come.