We got there 10ish and it was still under 60° but comfortable. Humanity has come back for the season and camping was open. We don't see a ton of people on our hikes here but their detritus can't be missed. More on that later. We were happy to see our first critter pretty quickly, a small Bullfrog.
We got to our best flip spot and I started looking under broken up concrete and burned logs. While doing that, Andrea found an in-the-blue Garter on the crawl, which was most unexpected. Not much dorsal stripe there, Buster!
I flipped a picnic table top (that I'm pretty sure I set up there last year) and got my own sweet, clean and very striped Garter.
We don't get many Holy Shit! moments these days as we're pretty much stuck in Massachusetts but I'm pretty sure I yelled that when I made this board flip.
Main target achieved.
Further on, I stood for quite a while as an Eastern Towhee was scrubbing around on the ground behind trees and bushes, defying my camerawork. I finally got an ID-able shot for our 50th bird species on the year.
Despite the overcast day, the sun was trying to pop out and the Painted Turtles were giving it their basking all.
I've heard them called "Sun Turtles" but never "Mud Turtles"... that'd be a shell of a different color! But these Painters were certainly muddy.
Andrea flipped our first Redback on the day.
I flipped our first Fowler's on the day.
We were at the middle pond where there is a lot of fishing and swimming usually. We had it to ourselves at the moment. A few dead Sunfish were in the shallows. I figure Snappers and Water Snakes might take care of them. I walked the rocks looking for secret Water Snakes. A Garter whizzed past me, then Andrea said there was a Water Snake over the spillway. A big female. I went up to it and its head was crushed. Murdered? Accidentally run over by a bike and moved? Either way, a human came into her home and killed her. I put her down towards the water, respectfully out of sight. It really put me in a mood.
I kept checking the rocks along the side of the pond. A woman came by and asked what we were looking for and I acidly said "a live Water Snake, unlike the murdered one we'd just seen" and she said that she'd just seen some probable mating Water Snakes on the other side of the pond. That helped. I had so much Nerodia on the brain that I thought this blue stripeless Garter was one at first!
This Fowler's hopped into some pretty yellow wildflowers for a nice photo.
This is the only Red-bellied Cooter that we saw all day so I include this rather shitty photo here.
Some happy Painted Turtles that, oddly enough, I didn't see with the naked eye, even though they were right there!
We never did see that tangle of Water Snakes. Oh well, back into the woods, I flipped a nice Redback. Yes, of course this is a set-up shot.
Another Fowler's jumped into perfect position.
Rock-flippin'. This wee Garter looked pink in person. Beauty!
This is an interesting Fowler's... we thought at first it was just dusty but no, it is just very pale. Almost leucistic. Decent sized, too.
Yes, we did peek at the boards on the way out and yes, both Milks and the Garter were still there. We didn't bother them any more. One last Bullfrog in the bog on the way out.
Well, we'd hoped for a live Water Snake but we still can't complain on that hike, except for the obvious things. We still had a little gas so we drove into Plymouth County to see if there were any nesting turtles at the old mill. There weren't and the water was rushing like mad so we saw no reptiles at all. We did see a couple of Canada Goose families with cute lil fuzzy goslings.
And we ended the day with Bird #52, a chubby Chipping Sparrow amongst the buttercups.
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