Mammoth at Grand Isle

 Tuesday February 2

From my notebook:
I am sick and tired of being cold! Yes, I know it's wintertime, and I know it needs to be cold. Kill some fleas and keep the bees hibernating and make the cold-sensitive bulbs bloom. But I'm cold!

It's 43 this morning and "feels like 37". That's because the blasted wind is still blowing. Apparently some monster of a low pressure system is on the coast up north and pulling cold air down with it.

The trees around the campsites here are full of little birds. I've seen butter-butts and phoebes and mockingbirds, but I suspect there are a lot more, too. But it's too cold to stand outside and look at them.

Walked out to the ocean that morning with Ed. We turned to the right (westerly, I guess) away from the wind. Out in the ocean there were intermittent piles of rocks making a sort of breakwater. We passed the first two or three, then as we were approaching the next one I took a closer look. It was covered with birds!

Herring gulls, probably other gulls. Black Skimmer. Cormorants. A few ducks. And then Ed spied a mammal in the water, actively feeding. When he swam his dorsal fin extended above the water and his body looked very long. But I couldn't get a picture of him. After much research, we postulated it might be a killer whale. (On the next day we saw dolphins, so probably that's what it was.)

 

Later Molly and went for a "jog" down the road to the coast guard station, then back and around the nature trail.  Pied-billed gulls, tricolored Heron, Great Egret, Little Blue Heron, Osprey (very common; patrolling the campground, too). Red-winged blackbirds. And some dead animal on the ground that Molly decided to consume. I got the tip of its  tail away from her; best I could do.

The nature trail starts from a parking lot past a huge restroom building, goes out as asphalt and large chunks of gravel, goes over a short boardwalk, then turns into wood shavings and then sand. It's as though they experimented with every sort of substrate possible.

From the top of the boardwalk I hoped to see water birds in the marshes, but no such luck. You really have to be in the right place for that. There were Brown Pelican on the bay near the pond, but that was all.

On the way back I found myself growing more and more alarmed that the route was taking me way out of my way. I even considered getting out my phone to check the navigation. But there was really no need--to my right there was the fence around the park and a road just past it, and to my left there was the pond. Sooner or later I'd have to get back to the entrance road--or end up against a fence or a pond and have to backtrack the whole way. In the dark.

But my fears were groundless. It was only ten minutes to the entrance, and from there I knew my way back to Mammoth.

Lovely day; lovely walk. But cold.