Wild Delaware

A Greater Yellowlegs is silhouetted inside yesterday’s reflected sunrise.

I was fortunate enough to take a walk on the nature trail at Killens Pond State Park with Bill McAvoy who is a DNREC Delaware Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program botanist. He showed me this fiddle head of the cinnamon fern and several other plants to watch for in the coming weeks as spring blooms into summer. I will be photographing more plants until Wild Delaware goes to press in August. Hopefully I will be able to find more insects like this crane fly and more blossoms like this swamp pink along the way.

Here’s a bird that seems perfectly named. Today was my first sighting this spring of these tall, elegant and delicate birds that feed on muddy pond bottoms.

This fish is the one that almost got away. But not quite. A Greater Yellowlegs caught him from behind and swallowed him whole.

Fashion at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century almost caused the end of the Snowy Egret. Their fancy feathers, especially the spring and summer breeding plumage, was the rage for adorning women’s hats and the bird was hunted almost to extinction.

On April 25, 1974 the Delaware legislature made the Ladybug the official state bug. Coccinellidae is the name of this family of beetles with more than 5,000 species found worldwide. Some people think having one land on you is a sign of good luck to come. Aphids and scale insects have an entirely different view of this predator. I found this one living life on the edge of a skunk cabbage leaf.

This morning I met a slug. 

I have to admit the encounter wasn’t quite like photographing a flock of snow geese exploding into the sky or catching a fox at just at sunrise. But here was a subject I could keep up with! Slugs are gastropod mollusks and hermaphrodites meaning they have both female and male reproductive organs. Their upper feelers are light sensors and their lower pair provide the sense of smell. Slugs have an important role in Delaware ecology as they eat dead leaves and fungus. This guy was on a magnolia leaf of last year’s vintage.

This afternoon was warm and this male Eastern Fence Lizard took advantage of the sunshine to bask in the light. 

Some days are better than others when you photograph wildlife.   You can never schedule a shot and everything is a found situation.  Predicting wildlife behavior is sometimes more difficult than predicting the weather.  Today I had a good half hour on the salt marsh this morning.  All of these photographs are made within 30 minutes.  Some days, you just get lucky.   

Osprey 

Red-winged Blackbird 

Double-crested Cormorant 

Red-winged Blackbird (female or immature) 

Savannah Sparrow 

Thousands visit Winterthur Museum to see their incredible collections of American furniture and decorative art. I visited yesterday and this morning to see the wildlife and their beautiful grounds.