April 25th, 2022

This may be the only flower that Joy and I saw on our last Photo Safari, which is unusual.  It's a pretty one though :)  One of the places we hike very frequently, Carlton Reserve, has this access point across the street from it's entrance, that we've eyed but never checked out until last week.  Actually, come to think of it, I am not actually certain that it does belong to Carlton.  But it belongs to somebody and it's across the street and there were trails soooooo we checked it out.

I will call this the Spring Fragrance Hike because that was the thing I noticed the most.  I cannot really take a photo of a fragrance, which is a shame because it was delicious.  I should be bottled.  Even without flowers (or flowers that are readily seen) Spring smells so good.  

Every season has a fragrance  - even here where the temperatures are pleasant nearly every day of the year.  And spring is the very best of all of the seasonal scents out there. The florals of course, but also the green, and more than that the new green. The baby leaves and the fledgling blossoms and bright green baby grasses coming up.  The sun warmed soil and sea tinged air is different in spring than any other time of year and I cannot get enough of it.  I find myself deep breathing as we walk instead of paying attention to my surroundings and finding things to take pictures of ;)

Oh never fear, I managed to get a few.  We started out seeing a deer.  They are always so pretty and delicate. And of course always remind me of Bambi.

We did see a few birds.  The best was a flock of Cedar Wax Wings.  Of course I had no idea what kind of bird they were but Joy did. She is a walking bird encyclopedia!  They were hop hop hoping around within a tree, rarely pausing, and then all of a sudden the entire gang would raise up into the sky and, as a group doing this amazing synchronized flying, swoop around the sky.  I was too busy marveling at the murmuration to get a photo of them flying but I did get one in a tree. Here are the birds:

Joy told me later that the cedar wax wings sometimes eat these certain kinds of berries and get, effectively, drunk on them which not only surprised me, but the mental image of drunken birds trying to do that synchronized flying cracked me up.  Sorry. Lowbrow humour.  (sill made me laugh)

​We saw lots of butterflies but I only captured a few and yes, in case you are wondering, the second butterfly is indeed standing on dung.  Horse poop to be specific.  Sometimes nature is mysterious.  Why on earth would a beautiful butterfly intentionally land on horse poo?  I have no idea and the butterfly wasn't talking.

The rest of the photos could be best classified as Rando's I suppose.  So here we go:

So that was it, the  Spring Fragrance Hike with almost no flowers!   Like I said, nature is mysterious.  But awesome.  Who knows what we will discover on our next photo safari!