Nature spotting

The wife, the baby and I went for a bit of a nature walk today. The area that we walk through is beautiful scummy, swampy kind of way.

Observe

Swimming is ill advised

While there were no Will-o’-the-wisps, we did get to see a number of interesting animals.

These are birds, they’re big and white and they have yellow beaks. That’s all I really know about them. I’m guessing that they fly and probably eat stuff.  Moving on…

Duck!

I’m guessing these are some sort of duck. Nature’s “D” student.

Now we get to the cool animals.

Muskrat eating.

Muskrat, NOT eating

These guys were pretty hard to capture. Once I got within even 20 feet of them they would disappear under the water and not resurface. I can only assume that they were eaten by the watcher in the water, or maybe they sank to their untimely deaths, or they can just hold their breath for a really long time. Still, they didn’t mark their territory in front of me, which I’m thankful for. They’re not called muskrats for nothing HIYO!

Finally we come to the awesomiest of the awesome. As we were heading out, we saw some girls taking a picture of a moss covered rock. As we got closer we saw that it wasn’t a rock, but a turtle. TURTLES!!! They informed us that when they were walking past before, she had been digging a hole. When they turned around and came back, they found this:

TURTLE!

That’s a painted turtle if I ever saw one, and you see those white things near it’s butt? Eggs. Those eggs are filled with mini turtles. They’ll sit in the hole for a couple of weeks and then depending on the temperature of the soil, will hatch as a group of male turtles, or female turtles, or there will be some sort of magical mix of male and female turtles. Here’s another look at the eggs, if you don’t believe me.

TURTLE! Eggs

Despite only being a few feet away, the turtle didn’t seem to mind us being there. Eventually we went on our way only to have to turn around a few minutes later. When we came back we found that the turtle had been quite busy.

TURTLE! eggs buried

Where did the eggs go? She buried them, silly. Coolest nature walk ever. Leia was mightily impressed.