The Blog and The Great Swamp
I was planning on using wordpress and publishing the blog from my website but it was getting too complicated and I got too lazy so for now I am staying here and double publishing at my blog on blogspot.com while I ponder how much work I really want to put into making the blog my own and what I like more. Any suggestions about what I should be writing about or what I'm writing too or not enough of is welcome.
So instead of working on that I spent some time working on images from our hike in the Great Swamp yesterday. For some the name Great Swamp would conjure up thoughts of Okefenokee or The Everglades, but remember-I live in RI and you can probably put one RI inside The Everglades. (Yes it's tough living in a state where they measure the size of landmarks by the number of your state you can fit in there) The Great Swamp is a RI DEM management area down in West Kingstown that borders the states largest pond-Worden Pond. It has 6 miles of looping double track mountain bike trails of which we hiked about 5 and probably got to meet most if not all of the swamps mosquito's in the process, long live Natrupel and DEET. The walk was long, hot, sweaty and for the most part not very productive photography wise, partly because we started at 10AM and the sun was already high. It started out good with a sighting (but no good image) of an Indigo Bunting, a decent image of a Chestnut Sided Warbler:
and this image of a lily in the swamp on the side of the path:
After another hour of hiking and swatting mosquito's and black flies we made it to the pond which at the shoreline was fabulous with a breeze and spectacularly bug free. There were some cool lily pads that I took pictures of with fish-eye but haven't gotten to yet and this frog which I nearly stepped on:
The walk back was just as exciting as the hike to the pond except for the damselflies which really are different from dragonflies-they are thinner and their eyes are on the sides of their heads almost on stalks instead of on top of their heads:
There is one other damselfly that just needs more work than I want to give it right now as I'm tapped out.
So instead of working on that I spent some time working on images from our hike in the Great Swamp yesterday. For some the name Great Swamp would conjure up thoughts of Okefenokee or The Everglades, but remember-I live in RI and you can probably put one RI inside The Everglades. (Yes it's tough living in a state where they measure the size of landmarks by the number of your state you can fit in there) The Great Swamp is a RI DEM management area down in West Kingstown that borders the states largest pond-Worden Pond. It has 6 miles of looping double track mountain bike trails of which we hiked about 5 and probably got to meet most if not all of the swamps mosquito's in the process, long live Natrupel and DEET. The walk was long, hot, sweaty and for the most part not very productive photography wise, partly because we started at 10AM and the sun was already high. It started out good with a sighting (but no good image) of an Indigo Bunting, a decent image of a Chestnut Sided Warbler:
and this image of a lily in the swamp on the side of the path:
After another hour of hiking and swatting mosquito's and black flies we made it to the pond which at the shoreline was fabulous with a breeze and spectacularly bug free. There were some cool lily pads that I took pictures of with fish-eye but haven't gotten to yet and this frog which I nearly stepped on:
The walk back was just as exciting as the hike to the pond except for the damselflies which really are different from dragonflies-they are thinner and their eyes are on the sides of their heads almost on stalks instead of on top of their heads:
There is one other damselfly that just needs more work than I want to give it right now as I'm tapped out.