I took a day off in the middle of the week to go on a nature hike with Lynda at Calvert Cliffs State Park. We both find our jobs stressful, and this was a welcome relief. We asked each other a couple of times during this lovely day, “Why don’t we do this more often?”

There’s a 1.8 mile hike from the parking lot to the beach between the cliffs. It took us four hours to make it to the beach and back. That’s just a little over a mile an hour. There was so much to see on the way. The highlight was the wetland area halfway through the trail where there are nesting red-headed woodpeckers. If you don’t know what one looks like, check it out in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Bird Guide. They’re gorgeous. The red in the picture isn’t as vibrant as they are in reality, but you’ll get the idea. We watched a battle between a pair of adult woodpeckers, and a squirrel who was trying to raid their nest hole.

I searched in vain on the beach for shark’s teeth, but I wasn’t disappointed. It was pretty out there.

After our hike, we tried to visit the famous Vera’s White Sands Beach Club and Marina, but found that it is only open Thursday through Sunday. We ended up driving a little farther south to Solomons, and had a great crab cake lunch at the Captain’s Table. While searching for an alternative for Vera’s, Lynda demonstrated for me how cool GPS technology has become. She searched for restaurants near our location, and even dialed the restaurant for her so that she could make sure they were open. We’ll have to come back another day to experience Vera’s.

There are more photos from this trip in a set called Calvert Cliffs State Park on my Flickr site.

You may have noticed that I have written two essays that end with “part 1,” but there is no succeeding “part 2,” at least not yet. That is not to say I won’t write them some day. But at this point, I’m wondering about it just as much as you are. In the meantime, check out this sculpture carved out of a fallen tree, which I found at Quiet Waters Park in Annapolis. In this first photograph, it is a dragon with a sleeping lady riding on its neck. A little farther down the trunk, there’s a tiger carved where the dragon’s tail ends. And the tiger’s tail encircles a little butterfly. This work is called “Spirit Dragon,” by D. H. Banker.

I hope I don’t run out of ideas to write about. If you find me writing something called Part One part 2, then you’ll know that I have. But what I’m really hoping for is inspiration. Send me some if you have any you can spare. Thanks.

Last night, Bob and I woke up to a sound we couldn’t quite identify, not quite a dog barking, not quite a cat yowling. It was more like a raspy howl. I jumped out of bed and looked out the window to see a fox in my driveway, howling over and over. He was there for a few minutes, and then he got up and ran into the street, running down toward the ponds, still howling.

It still amazes me how much wildlife we have all around us, even though we are in a suburb of Washington, D.C. We are just about a mile due north of the Maryland/District of Columbia line, between the Capitol Beltway and downtown Wheaton.

Today, Bob and I took a walk down the street, right where the fox was probably headed last night. There is a network of man-made ponds to capture the storm water from Wheaton. There’s little green space in Wheaton, and the rain that comes down on all the impervious surfaces (parking lots, roads, etc.) has to go somewhere. The water eventually drains to Sligo Creek via little creeks that run through the neighborhoods. Whenever there is a major shower in the area, the potential for erosion of these creek beds is significant, which is why the ponds were built. They hold all that water, and send a controlled amount of water to the creek downstream.

A side benefit to this is that lots of species of wildlife are attracted to this area. Here’s what we saw today:

We didn’t see another fox, but we saw a pair of deer at the edge of one of the ponds.

Dozens of Canada geese; one pair had a gaggle of five goslings.

Several wood ducks: two females with clutches of chicks numbering seven and eight each, and one male. The males have fantastic coloring. http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Wood_Duck.html

Two black-crowned night-herons. http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Black-crowned_Night-Heron.html

A green heron.
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Green_Heron.html

One female belted kingfisher.
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Belted_Kingfisher.html

One killdeer.
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Killdeer.html

A couple of small turtles and one large one, possibly a snapping turtle.

Tree swallows, song sparrows, robins, grackles, a phoebe, a mallard duck, and a red-winged blackbird. We saw a baby robin that seemed to have just mastered flying, and a baby grackle that was on the ground but didn’t look like it knew how, yet.

Six tiger swallowtails clustered together in the mud, extracting minerals and nutrients from the soil.

A school of about thirty brown bullhead fish.

When I was shopping for a house twelve years ago, I found the ponds down the street. I saw my first night-heron there. It just about sold me on the place right then. Even from inside my house, I can see all kinds of wildlife, because there is an open field across the street. Behind that is a patch of woods, and behind the woods and to the right are the ponds.

I’ve never been such a fanatical birder that I keep a life list, but I do have a couch list. Follow this link to a piece I wrote about it on Julie’s Tacky Treasures: http://www.tackytreasures.com/tackyhtml/couch-list.html. I accumulated thirty three species on this list before I stopped. It’s unlikely that I’ll add any more to the list because I moved the bird feeder from the front yard where I could see it from the couch, to the back.  But if I do, that page is where I’ll report it.