"Out & About" Photo Blog: 2nd Marsh -- January 10th, 2012

It had been a while but I was back at the marsh today. With our unusual weather there is no snow, only some thin ice in the channel and in what will be vernal pools in the Spring.

With all the growth gone, things feel very open and barren, and with no snow at all, a bid odd for January 10th.

There's lots of moss on fallen logs to add some green to all the brown.

With their strong stalks, Cattails stand tall all year long. These are at the Beaver Pond. No wonder it's so seldom you can spot a beaver, there's very little open water any time of year.

There's very little healthy fungus this time of year but this species seems to survive quite well. There's quite a bit of a pure white species too.

What will turn into vernal pools in a couple months. They're always found by a few pairs of Mallards.

Farewell Creek from the bridge over it. I always think of my snow-filled shot of this scene from a few years back (the next image). At the rate we're going this year, who knows if I'll even get a snow shot of it... but it's way too early to count winter out isn't it. Will we get a 2 or 3 ft dump of snow in the weeks ahead?

The same view from February 7th, 2008. I have no idea what it looked like on January 10th of any other year, so who knows, maybe it'll look like this again this year.

Wild Cucumber pods... another thing we see throughout the winter.

The channel along the berm is frozen over. The Herons, Cormorants & Turtles are long gone now.

I met a guy with one of the new small cameras that take long lenses. Not much camera to hold onto. You'd definitely be holding the lens. Looks weird.

Though the resident Chickadees, Nuthatches and one of the Downy Woodpeckers came for seeds on the boardwalk, I didn't get any decent shots of any of them. Several flocks of geese went over that were much easier to get a shot of, at a distance though.