September 27th, 2023

What the what?   There are two Curry Creek Preserves?  How could I have lived here this long without knowing this?    Well I suppose it doesn't really  matter how it happened that this bit of information  escaped me.  The important thing is that I  know it now.

Joy and I have been hiking what we thought was the one and only Curry Creek (which turns out to be Curry Creek East) for years. { The fact that the sign clearly says on it "Curry Creek East) obviously meant nothing to us.}  It's a smallish local preserve but we've taken some great photographs there.  My one and only picture of an armadillo was taken there.   Also the baby Swallow Tail Kites were there. And come to think of it, I think my only picture of a Bob-White was snapped on those trails!

So Joy was as surprised (and intrigued) as I was about this Curry Creek West business when I told her which of course meant that we had to check it out.  Yesterday, despite predictions of rain, we loaded up and headed over.  The sky was gloomy and the air became progressively more humid as the minutes ticked by so we knew rain was coming and we did not dawdle. But you know what?  As it turns out, it's not a dawdling sort of place.

​It was fine, I suppose. Turns out to be even smaller than the other Curry Creek Preserve. But there were trails, well marked and there were a couple of birds hanging around the edges of a couple of ponds:

I think my biggest issue with this Western Curry Creek is that at no point were we ever beyond the view of the homes in the area.  When we hike, Joy and I really like that feeling of being out in nature, that feeling of being where the wild things are and it's hard to maintain that illusion when I can glance over and see some nice lady hanging out her laundry.

Drat.  We cruised through it fairly quickly and we did take a few photos and slapped at a LOT of mosquitoes and we were back at our starting point in no time at all.  Sigh.   Kind of disappointing over all.    What do we do now? we asked each other. " Well, I suppose we could go back to the other Curry Creek, " Joy  said,  and so we did.  

Now here are the rest of the photos. 99% of which are of the Real Curry Creek Preserve.  So this Photo Safari is going to be called the "At Least We Tried Hike"  because we did give the imitation Curry  Creek a try. And now we know that we don't need to go back.

We did see more birds at our 2nd stop and more Blue Jay's than anything else!  I don't think we've ever seen so many Jays in one place!  Here's a sampling:

But of course there were other birds too.  And I have to mention here that the gloomy day certainly impacted being able to take a nice clear shots since the birds were hanging out in the trees which are shady and the sky was very grey so please bear with me on the quality of the shots. I added as much light as possible and sometimes it just didn't help much.  Anyway, here you go.  Birdies;

Initially we saw no birds at all and I think I even said to Joy at some point that I suspected this was going to be a botanical hike.  And there's not one thing wrong with that, it was just an observation.  Luckily I was wrong, we saw plenty of other photo worthy things!  There just happened to be loads of flowers too. Hope you like flower photos coz here they come! I will try really hard to only post the really good ones:

The biggest happy surprise were the number of insects we saw. Loads of dragonflies and butterflies, lots of different sorts of wasps and bees and a few other bugs that I'm not absolutely positive what were!  Only got a few photos, (they move so quickly!) but here they are:

 Last but not least there is Curry Creek itself.  Curry, by the way, is the name of one of the first settlers to the Venice area.  I think that fact deserves to have a creek and a couple of preserves named after them!  The Creek and reflections of things in the creek:

And we've come to the end of another Photo Safari Report, this time the "At Least We Tried Hike".  I'm glad we checked out the Other Curry Creek. We learned something new, which is always a good thing, we finished up just as the sky was beginning to  sprinkle on us so our timing was terrific, we got some exercise, some time together and few decent photos.  

Another Great Day!

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