Wild Delaware

A Snowy Egret is surrounded by hungry gulls that would try to make the egret drop the fish it caught. The gulls were successful several times and the egret gave up and left the area.

Northern Green Frogs are common along much of the East Coast where they inhabit fresh water ponds, streams and marshes. This guy may look calm enough but he is waiting for something – almost anything – to wander by. Northern Green Frogs eat pretty much any living thing they can capture and swallow.

An Osprey brings a half-eaten carp toward its nest in Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge near Broadkill Beach this morning.  Normally, the males do most of the fishing and eat their fill of the catch before returning to the nest. There are at least three nesting pairs of Osprey near the fresh-water impoundment on the refuge there and the fish are plentiful this year.

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Take one look at this beautiful terrapin and it is easy to see why our neighbor, the State of Maryland, would name the Diamondback their state reptile. Once plentiful in the brackish water surrounding the Delaware Bay, the Diamondback was considered a delicacy and was hunted almost to extinction in the early 1900s. This terrapin was photographed this morning along the edge of Rehoboth Bay and has some barnacles hitching a ride on her diamondback.

If you are a Great Egret scratching you throat is quite a balancing act.

Summer must be a tough time to be a fox as their thin coats look a little ragged and this guy was covered with big ticks. On the positive side, food is plentiful and the hunting is easy.

A Black-crowned Night-Heron emerges from the late-day shadows at Bombay Hook yesterday. This nocturnal feeder is the most widespread heron in the world being at home on five continents. In Delaware they are much less common than many other herons and often harder to find and photograph as they often feed at dusk and at night.

Growing up in Delaware I was taught we don’t have poisonous snakes in the state. Turns out that’s not true. In fact, we have copperheads in southwestern Sussex county and the Piedmont region in the northern part of the state along the Pennsylvania border. This copperhead is from Frankford in Sussex County. According to Jim White at the Delaware Nature Society our two small populations of this pit viper may be two variants of the southern copperhead. I was able to get very close for this portrait but if you see a snake with these reddish-brown coppery markings I recommend keeping a wide berth to avoid these fangs and a painful and possibly fatal bite.

A beautiful world can sometimes be found in small things. Milkweeds are blooming now and their fragrant flowers attract many insects. Here’s a look at what came to visit at Ashland Nature Center yesterday morning.

bumblebee

Dogbane Beetle

red milkweed beetle

slug

honeybee