May 20th, 2025

Oh My Goodness!  The cuteness of this bunny is too much!    Most wild rabbits will run like, well, rabbits as soon as they see a scary human, but this little guy not only didn't run away, but actually kept hopping closer and closer !    I guess as scary humans go, Joy and I are okay : )

This is yet another Photo Safari Report but it will probably be the shortest one I've ever written.  So short in fact that I considered waiting for the next hike and combining them.  And then, I changed my mind, as I tend to do.  At any rate, this one I am calling the Ten Bunny Hike. We've never seen so many rabbits on one hike before.  There were bunnies everywhere we looked! At every turn, every curve in the path,  behind trees and shrubs, in the wild grasses and in this case, even right in the middle of the trail, there were bunnies! They are sooo cute!  And they always look so soft that I want so badly to touch them..................but I don't.

I'm not even certain that the actual number was ten.  It was at least ten but we stopped counting after awhile. One of the things about wild rabbits is that they look an awful lot alike. I'm sure you are thinking, "Sam, how do I know that it was actually ten bunnies and not one bunny ten times."  There are some things you just have to take on faith. This is one.  Here are a few of our ten bunnies:

It was a perfectly lovely day for hiking in spite of that fact that, outside of an abundance of rabbits, we didn't see a lot of other things that were photo worthy. Let's face it, you can take just so many pictures of a palm tree.  Or any sort of tree for that matter.

We weren't bothered by it being a less than stellar photography day. It all balances out. There have been hikes where I came home with several hundred photos. No exaggeration. And others, like this one, where it was less than 50. And most of those I deleted as being, not quite up to par.  On the other hand, we hiked a decent distance in a relatively short period of time.  On high photography days, we tend to cover a lot less ground because there are places where we stop "for a minute" to get one particular shot and end up being there for 20 minutes taking dozens of pictures because it turns out to be a Mecca for birds, flowers, bees, butterflies and so forth.  

On those hikes we don't travel as far because we stop so often. But during those stops we are shooting constantly and in every possible direction: straight ahead, to our left, our right, above us, behind us and way down low.  So low that I have to either kneel, lie down, or sit on the ground to get the picture.  

This was obviously not that sort of hike.  This was the fewer photos but more ground covered type.  And that's ok.  The bunnies were a surprise.  Of course we never really know for certain what we will find. Although we were hoping to see the eagles.  Nope.  Not so much as a feather left behind.  Just their slowly disintegrating nest:

The other unusual thing that we saw were a lot of crabs. It was unusual in that crabs generally hang out at the beach or in swampy areas and this was neither.  The water is nearby but not near enough for this particular preserve to be considered beach or swamp. So that's kind of a mystery.  Here is the crab.  Kind of hard to make out.  Use your powers of imagination:

The few birds that we saw, I did not capture very well.  Ah well, it is what it is.

I did get a few botanicals, primarily wildflowers though I will be honest and tell you that my interpretation of what denotes a wildflower is fairly liberal.  Basically, to me, anything that blooms and is not a domestic specific intentionally created Flower is a Wildflower.  Which means most of these are probably blossoming weeds.  I don't care. They are wildflowers.  You heard me. I said what I said.

Looks like I have just enough photos left to post some randos:

Like I said, one of the shortest Photo Safari reports ever!   Still for all it's brevity, I wouldn't change the Ten Bunnies hike for anything because I wouldn't be able to give up a single one of those little rabbits.

​Let's see what this week's hike brings us!  It's always a surprise!