Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

adrian_turtle, cattitude and I went for a delightful walk today. Yesterday I'd figured we would need to get out in the morning in order to avoid the rain; that turned out not to be true, but by the time we realized that Adrian was over here, and Cattitude and I were ready to head out, for what turned out to be a couple of hours in the sunshine. (It was mid-60s F (18 C) when we went out, very good walking weather.)

I wanted to head south on Lake Street and explore a little I hadn't done before; the two of them worked out a route while I was tediously renewing my prescriptions. (Rite Aid's system is a lot more efficient than Walgreen's, in case you're trying to decide between those two chains.)

We walked down Lake Street past Route 2 into Belmont, and revised our plans when it transpired that Google Maps had tried to guide us onto the highway. The streets in that bit of Belmont are curved around Little Pond. We found the unpaved, very pleasant access route from the street to the pond, and spent some time looking at the water. That bit of woods is mostly conifer, so we were walking on dried pine needles. The other pleasant surprise in Belmont was some late, very fragrant honeysuckle blossoms: I smelled them before I saw them, which is unusual. (I like honeysuckle, but not as much as Cattitude does.)

After Little Pond we found the Fitchburg Cutoff Path, which connects to the Minuteman Bikeway at Alewife Brook T station. There's a boardwalk leading from that path into a delightful constructed wetland, built for storm water management. In among the water lily pads, we saw several frogs, the first Cattitude or I had seen in the wild in years. (There is, alas, a worldwide amphibian shortage.) First Cattitude spotted two fairly small frogs sitting on lily pads (not jewel-colored tree frog small, but small), and then Adrian saw a much larger one swimming below the surface. We spent quite a while watching the frogs sit, swim, and even hop, and then walked a little further and saw more frogs, including another large one. There were also dragonflies and a goldfinch and a wood duck, all of which are good, and all of which we had seen in the area earlier in the summer (okay, we probably hadn't seen these dragonflies before, though the goldfinch or duck might be one of the ones we'd seen in August).

We eventually decided that lunch would be a good idea, walked the last bit to the T station, and went to Central Square for lamb shank, pumpkin kibby, and then ice cream and tea.

We're just back from a few days in the Olympic National Park. The Hoh Rain Forest was as delightful as I'd expected, though different in detail—brighter and drier, and with a lot more maple mixed in among the firs, and we saw few birds. Also, it's surprisingly tiring to take two and a half hours to slowly walk about a mile, most of it with little change in elevation but almost none of the path actually flat.

The tide pools were more delightful than I'd expected: I'd seen sea anemones in an aquarium, but that didn't prepare me for seeing them on rocks in actual tide pools, a few here and some more there and dozens more right here, many tucked in, others with tentacles waving, and some with tentacles waving on one side. Some of the anemones had covered themselves with a layer of mud, or mud-and-gravel, or even mud and bits of crab shell: a tide pool that looked at first like it was full of mud was actually full of anemones. The anemones were different shades of green, some pink, and some pink-and-green. There were also some fine seastars, oranges and purples. (And lots of barnacles, and some chitons, but I got very focused on the anemones.)

We didn't see a lot of birds on this trip, except for the swallows where we were staying (Kalaloch Lodge, right at the Pacific Ocean coast), but I did get a good long look at a bald eagle, from the beach where we had been exploring the tide pools. (I had added bald eagle to my life list on the strength of seeing recently-fledged birds flying free in Inwood Hill Park, but that was part of an attempt to reintroduce them to the area; this bird was entirely wild.)

Unfortunately, the things I forgot to pack included the elastics I use for my PT exercises; I did the exercises this evening, but I was supposed to do them Saturday and then yesterday. I did quite a bit of walking, including a good deal up and down hills (and stairs), but while that's generally good exercise it won't help my shoulder.

Hanging out in the park earlier this evening, cattitude looked over to the lawn in front of the Columbia boathouse, which is often occupied by Canada geese.

We saw a dark shape moving back and forth. While I was eliminating possibles, Cattitude identified it as "the skunk." It proceeded to move back and forth, slowly, over a patch of lawn for a few minutes, then finished whatever it was doing. It moved rapidly, away from us and from where people tend to be, then onto a bit of paved path that connects a building to the dock they launch the crew shells from. We watched for a little longer, then went back inside.

It's "the skunk" because he'd seen it once before, and we'd both smelled skunk on occasion in the last few years, so we knew one lived around here.

We've been seeing little tiny crabs (a centimeter or less across) lurking in holes, or scuttling short distances away from them, on the salt marsh (in Inwood Hill Park) for the last few years. They're only visible at low tide: mud-colored bodies, with bits of yellow on their claws.

Rarely and more recently, we'd seen larger crab shells, on the mud or, as today, on the grass.

This afternoon, with the tide partway out, we saw two larger crabs in the water, swimming and crawling (depending on depth and whether there were rocks in the way). I'd guess the larger was two or three inches across (5-8 cm, for my metric friends), the larger about two-thirds that size. One was moving toward the shore, the other away, parallel to the first; cattitude suggested that they didn't like each other, an easy guess because any two random crabs tend not to like each other.

[cross-posting to inwoodhillpark]