Ginter Botanical Garden

I had a good excuse yesterday for sitting on my butt watching college basketball all of a beautiful spring afternoon - I had already run and walked 13 miles for half-marathon training and gotten lots of fresh air. But I didn't have that excuse this afternoon - an even nicer spring afternoon with temperatures in the 60's (F). So we spent a couple of hours leisurely walking around Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. Even though only the early flowers and trees are in bloom right now, there is still plenty of color and beauty to see. It is a really nice garden, split between a large outdoors portion with plenty of interesting garden areas, habitats, and pathways and a really great "conservatory". Here are some photos from the afternoon. To see other spring photos from around Richmond, go to yesterday's post on my racing for a cure blog.

Photos from the outdoor gardens:

Photos from inside the conservatory - feast of colors for the eyes:

Urban Wildlife - Great Blue Heron Rookery

Less than 5 minutes from this spot in busy downtown Richmond is an amazing bit of wildness - a great blue heron rookery.

Between winter weather, life, work, and most importantly, Team in Training workouts to run a half marathon in seven weeks, I have had precious little time for a hike. So I seized the moment today at lunch and took a quick hike along the James River in downtown Richmond. The objective was to get back to the great blue heron rookery that my friend Susan and I walked to a week ago, but this time with a camera. Here are some of the sights that I experienced on a beautiful spring-like day just 56 hours after 10 degree temperatures and just 4 days after nearly a foot of snow, which is now mostly gone.

At the Haxall Canal walk, there is this memorial to Christopher Newport, who led the first English expedition to what became Richmond, Virginia.

From there, the path leads along the Flood Wall. The fairly new condos in the left background (looking back from where I started) have great river and city views.

From here, climb down a short metal ladder and ...

... walk along the "trail", a metal catwalk over a large pipe under railroad tracks. To the right, everything is urban, to the left, you could almost be in the boondocks. Almost, except for some bridges and powerlines.

It is not the most scenic trail in the world, but after just a few hundred feet, the great blue heron rookery appears on an island in the river.

Great blue herons on their nests. There are about 40 nests on the island.

Wider view of the rookery, river, and bridges.

These rapids, which occur for several miles, are called the "Falls of the James" and are the reason Richmond exists where it does. The James River is not navigable from the sea above this point.

I walked up-river perhaps a quarter mile, and took this shot looking back downriver to the island with the rookery.

There were beaches and rocky areas. Here is a natural bench and a pot hole, both carved by time and the river. Imagine how many eons these took.

Another pothole, the front of which has collapsed into the river.

I sat on this "bench" and ate lunch. Talk about a comfortable spot to sit on a beautiful day, eating my peanut butter and jam sandwich. No king eating a 5 star lunch in a palace enjoyed their lunch more than I did today, listening to the river rushing past me and feeling the warmth of the sun.

Just days ago, these flowers, if even yet in bloom, would have been buried by snow.

Seven Great Wildlife Experiences

In my Racing for a Cure blog, I am writing a series of posts on things I have experienced in the seven years since surviving lymphoma. I am calling this my "seven things" series.

The latest of these posts is seven great wildlife experiences I had in the past seven years. It was hard to narrow the list but it is still a pretty good list, even with the many things I had to leave off.

My Local Training Route

This season for my marathon training, I find myself doing a particular little route more and more often, because part of it goes through some woods and it feels a bit like a hike (other than it is usually pitch dark when I am training). But the other day, I got in some rare daylight training and took a bunch of pictures, especially of the little wooded section.

You can read about it and see the photos here.

This morning, I started before 5AM and it was so dark that I had to slow down on the trail part. But when there is a moon shining, there is plenty of light to pick my way along the trail with pretty good vision. As spring gets nearer, I know I will hear birds, frogs, and toads on this part of the route, and even see a rabbit run across the path in the predawn darkness, so it will feel even more like a mini-hike!

Two Short Winter Coastal Hikes

I was back to the coast for the weekend. Saturday, the weather was so nice that I couldn't resist a short hike, even though I had run and walked 9+ miles that morning for Team in Training.

The Back Bay refuge dike trails are closed until April 1 to protect wintering waterfowl. So other than walking on the beach, one can only hike a few miles. It was nearly spring-like Saturday afternoon and we had a nice hike. Out in the bay, we could see hundreds of tundra swans - very pretty. We also saw a nice group of mallards in a pond. The sun striking the green heads of the drakes was striking. Here are a few of the sights:

Small fresh water pond. In warm weather, I often see bitterns and large turtles here.

Back Bay

Dead tree along the path through the marsh. There is a huge "widow maker" hanging from the top of the tree.

Dunes and the Atlantic Ocean

On Sunday, I returned to hike a few miles more, although the weather was at least 20 degrees colder, with a breeze. The large flocks of swans were not in evidence, although I did see some of these majestic birds. I hiked to a large blind overlooking the marsh, and there was a flock of several hundred Canada geese to be seen in the distance.

One unusual find was a dead nutria, nearly submerged but partially visible above the water in an impoundment. These large rodents are an exotic species, and like many exotics, are destructive to marsh habitats in North America. I found a branch and fished him out of the water - until then I couldn't tell if it were an animal of a big ball of vegetation. He was close to three feet long from the nose to the end of his tail. I was wondering if he could have been shot by refuge personnel, as he looked in good health (prior to death, of course) and clearly would not have drowned, being aquatic. Nothing had been feeding on him, so he had not been killed by a bobcat or a coyote. He had large bright yellow incisors. I did take some photos, but decided not to post them because maybe someone would find them too morbid.

Much prettier than a dead nutria were these tundra swans and the start of a sunset over Back Bay:

Correction!

I am pretty sure that my post that I called Snow Geese should have been called Tundra Swans. I got a good look, in good light with binoculars, at big flocks of similar sounding white birds, and they were clearly swans, not geese.

When I asked a refuge manager about it, he said that the swans there are tundra swans. In a few months, they will be migrating a couple of thousand miles to the Northern Canadian tundra. He told me that anecdotes from the 1950's say that the flocks of swans coming into Back Bay were so huge that they darkened the skies. That certainly tells some grim tales about wetland habitat loss.

14 Miler in Charlottesville

Today, part of our marathon team joined Team Charlottesville for a hilly and tough 14 miler. Enough of it went through scenic and rural areas that I decided to link the description and photos in my racing for a cure blog.

It was a fun outing, but tiring. It was nice to meet teammates from other parts of Virginia.

Hollywood Rapids

Our 11 mile team run today felt like a hike at times, passing on to Belle Isle and past the impressive Hollywood Rapids.

So I am linking to that post from my hiking blog for the many photos I took during this fun outing.

Gray Day at Back Bay

Despite yesterday’s cold 12+ miles marathon training, my legs were only slightly fatigued today. I guess I am slowly getting back in shape. So I decided a short hike in Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge was in order.

It was a cold, gray day there, but not nearly as cold as yesterday – probably 20 or more degrees warmer. Even so, sleet spit at times, and there was a bit of a wind chill. I didn’t bother to bring a camera or binoculars, figuring that I didn’t want to mess with the former, and really not the latter either. Most of the trails, especially the dike trail to False Cape, are closed through March, and there are limited chances to see wildlife. Turtles, snakes, and frogs are hibernating deep within the mud. Many of the more exotic birds have migrated for the winter. So I treated this as a hike for a little bit of exercise, with a remote chance of running into interesting animals or great scenery.

I could hear the haunting calls of hundreds of snow geese well out into the bay. Even without binoculars, I could see all the white dots in the distance. The distinctive calls of Canada geese blended in, along with some ducks quacking in the icy marshes. I spotted a belted kingfisher flying over one small pond, hearing its rattling call before I actually spotted the bird. I marveled that an animal could survive in this weather, solely on being able to catch small fish with its mouth.


Everything was grey – sky, water, horizon – but not my mood. It rarely is, and especially not when messing around in the outdoors, getting some fresh air and exercise. So while the exotic wildlife was not to be seen and the wind blew a bit, it just was fun to be outside for a few miles.

Snow Geese

I was at the beach for a couple of days, and today dawned cold and clear. After the rain of yesterday afternoon, and a tough ten miles for training Friday morning, it seemed like a good morning for a short winter hike. I was a little stiff and sore from the miles yesterday, and so took it at a very easy pace, hiking about 3 miles.

I was in Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge. I saw a pretty buck on the drive into the refuge - maybe the same one that I watched a couple of months ago. I parked the car - the only one in the parking lot. Shortly after starting my hike, I could hear the sounds of geese in the distance. Their calls got louder and louder. I startled about 20 ducks in the marsh, and they flew off, quacking as they flew.

When I reached an area with open views, I could see snow geese by the hundreds or even the thousands in the distance. They were from a couple of hundred yards to about a half mile away. It was quite a sight, and a beautiful sound to hear them all calling.





After hiking down to the observation blind - two lonely mallards were the only things I saw - I headed out for a little beach combing. Looks like Harry Potter (or maybe it was Lord Vol... er, He Who Shall Not be Named) got there first:

I found deer tracks all over while hiking, including these on the beach itself:

I also found the egg case of a whelk (the long thing that looks kind of like a snake skin or a backbone) and of skates. The egg cases of the later are sometimes called "Mermaid Purses":