Andrea's Vacation Begins! 8-21 and 8-22-2026

Yay! Time together! Yay... so many chances to do nature walks! But boo... the first day was cool and rainy. Still, we decided to go out to a place that is good for flipping stones and finding snakes. That's always an option on overcast days. We didn't hurry, which was also nice.

When we got to the spot in Norfolk County, it was a bird paradise. Great Egrets, Snowy Egrets, a Great Blue Heron and various gulls were hanging out enjoying the snacks that the tide had brought in.

I knew I still needed Common Terns on the year and they started to flock out in the bay.

This picture cracks me up because of all of the Double-crested Cormorant noggins popping up from the water!

So I'll call it now... #71, Common Tern.

And, even though there are some in the other photos, #72- Laughing Gull.

To be honest, I never knew they were up here but it turns out they breed up here and some of those flying gulls in the above pictures are juveniles. The more you know!

The next day, August 22nd, was our anniversary. For 23 years she has put up with me. Not sure how, but I hit the lottery big-time. It was another cool and rainy day. We'd thought about heading into Bristol County to look for the elusive Massachusetts Box Turtle but we got up too late. Eventually, we just went over to a local spot that is usually too darn boiling on sunny days and found it perfect on this cloudy one.

Hey, what do you know! A Bullfrog!

While that was the only cold-blooded find of the day, there were other cool things to see, like a Honeybee on Goldenrod with it's saddle-bags packed with pollen!

The river was very low but that made for a lot of shorebirds, including #73, a Solitary Sandpiper.

I snapped a bunch of pictures of the various birds, then tried to ID them at home, with a little help from a Facebook group. It turns out I got #74, a Semipalmated Sandpiper, a bird I thought I'd photographed before but hadn't, making it Lifer #207!

We considered that a good use of downtime and a good way to spend our anniversary. We got Thai food to go and took it home to watch Mario Bava's Kill Baby Kill, the second feature from our first date, which was also August 22nd. (We got married a year to the day after our first date.)

The counts would be getting bigger in the days that followed but these days are good, too. Whenever you get out in nature with the person you love, it is a special day.