May 03rd, 2024

"The Shadow Knows" that Joy and I were back out hiking this week so that means this must be another Photo Safari Report!~  I struggled with what to call this one because there doesn't seem to be one predominant theme of photos so I think this one is just the Mostly Randos Hike. Lotsa Rando photos this time 'round.  Which is just fine.  We skipped last week so we get what we get.  (Thank you to Joy for the above photo by the way)

It's getting warmer and just a smidge humid now that we've enterred the merry merry month of May, so we decided to hike Sleeping Turtle Preserve quickly before the rainy season starts.  Two reasons:  It tends to flood when it rains and, really because of that, once the rain begins the mosquitos are rampant and they think that Joy is a tasty treat!   Got to get in there before the rain falls every year just so we can say it's been done.

It's a preserve of much greenery, trees upon trees upon trees!  There could be giant scary predatory carnivorous and hungry wildlife within an arms reach of us and we would never know because the foliage is so thick!  Which is the exact same reason it's hard to photograph birds.  They were all around us, we could hear them, but they were very VERY hard to find.  Little buggers were hiding in the foliage laughing.   I didn't get much but here you go:  

The trails were beautiful, of course, and for a change we didn't have to wade through any streams or jump across any large puddles or creeks, or even build any frond bridges!  For a change we just moseyed down the paths.  Actually we did climb into (and therefore out of) a few ravines that would normally be full of water and had to duck under a couple of gravity defying leaning trees and the step over (sometimes climb over) large trees that had already fallen.  But comparatively, that's nothin'.  We did notice that while some of the trails were still nicely cleared others were so overgrown that occasionally we wondered if we had taken a bad turn and lost the trail. No worries, we figured it out. We always do.

Probably because it was such a lovely sunny dry day, there were scads of non-mosquitos insects:  spiders, bees, butterflies, dragonflies, bugs I don't know what were AND a dung beetle!  Didn't manage to capture them all, still saw them and that counts.

I probably got more botanical shots than anything. Partly because botanicals hold still which makes them much easier to capture but also because they are so beautiful, in every stage of life.  Some of these have gone by, some are in full bloom and some have no actual blooms. All of them are beautiful.  (Same goes for people!!)  I will break it up into two slideshows just for convenience sake:

I don't want to forget my black'n'white shots. Only a small handful today:

And of course by now you know you are nearing the end of the Photo Safari Report when I get to the Rando Category.   I probably have too many of them here so I will try to whittle it down to a more manageable slideshow.  Here we go:

We had a great time on the Mostly Randos Hike.  Hope you liked the pictures!