The Great Outdoors

Thank you. Yes, it is a beautiful area., but not so loud. If word gets out there will be people swarming all over. Actually, foliage tourism took a hit this year because it's been cloudy and rainy every weekend for two months. It's getting old.
Seneca and Cayuga are the big Finger Lakes. Seneca is less than four miles wide, almost forty miles long, and over six hundred feet deep. It's bottom is actually below sea level.

Wow! I fished Mille Lacs lake in Minnesota, that lake is so big that you cannot see the other side of the shore, it's like looking across the ocean at a beach. But the lake is very shallow, most of it less than 38 feet deep, and when the wind comes up you get breaking whitecaps that will swamp your boat, people drown yearly. Much respect for Mother Nature! I caught a 10 lbs. Northern Pike there! Great walleye and perch fishing too. We were out on it at dusk and the wind came up, sets of rolling waves so high we could not see the shore when running in the troughs, between the waves, had to pop up on the backs of the swells to see where we were, ran with the swell until opposite our landing point and then had to ride the swells in, beached the boat at speed to avoid the breaking waves on shore.

daaaaaaaang !

I looked up Mille Lacs on Google Earth. Yeah, that's a big one. Just a hop, skip, and a jump from Brainerd, home of Paul Bunyon and Fargo. It would get scary in waves like that.

I can't seem to find a number of my pictures of the Spring Beauty flower I mentioned way back. Here are a couple. The flowers are delicate and only grow about three inches tall. They bloom in April and May around here. They have some color variations, mostly a mixture of white and reddish colors. These are typical.

Very nice

On Thursday we took our last kayak run of the year. I only got out four times this summer. Either the temperature was too high, the water too low, or it was raining. We saw one or more large and smaller Great Blue Herons. They usually fly just a short way down river so we keep bumping into them and can't be certain which is which. This picture is from another run, just to show what they look like. They eat pretty much any little thing like fish, frogs, crayfish, salamanders...

We stopped on a gravel bank for lunch where I took the first picture. This is the eagle pair I've mentioned a couple times. I think the female was the upper bird because it looked larger in real life than in the picture. The lower eagle flew up to the other when we left the gravel bar.
It was a good day.

Once and a while I will happen across a Blue Heron but we have a wide verity of cranes. Some of them (like sandhill cranes) are often mistaken for herons. They (both) are beautiful birds and pleasant to watch.

Those are absolutely great photos yo ! 👍

While I was growing up I thought it would be cool to have something called "Great Blue" hanging around but all we had were cranes. Then I learned our "cranes" were actually herons, everybody just called them cranes. We also have Green Herons. I'll post a picture someday. I've seen Sandhill Cranes in Florida. They're even bigger than the Great Blues and quite impressive.

Those photos were just an iPhone. I'm going to get another good camera but I just spent all my extra money on silly things like insurance and taxes so I have to start saving again.

Ive seen them (sandhill cranes) in Texas but the first one I saw was at a swamp in Georgia.

I also took these on the kayak trip. I moved away from this area before I was old enough to appreciate or even learn much about it. I'm trying to make up for lost time by learning as much about the Twin Tiers as I can.
This area of Pennsylvania/New York was formed by at least three mountain chains that eroded or were broken up. It was covered by at least two eastern and one western sea. Much of that time it was at or near a coast. Depending on the depth and flow of water we either got sediments that formed shales and slates or we got depths where the critters lived. Many of our rocks are layers of shale and, well I can't call it fossil-bearing because the fossils are gone, but layers that once contained organisms. You can see some of the layers in the pictures as well as a rock that still has some type of crustacean shells.

The gold may look pretty but to me it's very ugly. It's Japanese Knotweed and it's spreading like wildfire and choking out many native plants.

I grew up in this area, out in the country. I was lucky enough to stumble into a fair education and an enjoyable career. Now I'm retired and getting back to my first true love, Nature and anything to do with nature. It's so beautiful, peaceful, and still where I feel most comfortable.

The weather suddenly turned warm so we made our first kayak run a few days ago. Sorry, no pictures. There wasn't much to see anyway. Except for some merganser males. They seem to be here only in the spring. We rarely see them in the summer, only females and young. And a handsome red-tailed hawk and a great blue heron. The usual stuff.

I think I'd be happy most anywhere along the Appalachians, though I haven't seen much of them. Some years ago I hiked up Panther Mountain in the Catskills. Hang on, I think I have a picture. I know this could be taken from almost anywhere but, trust me, it's taken from somewhere on Panther Mountain. I have better but this will give folks an idea what the Catskills are like. It's usually hazy in Pennsylvania in summer. All these trees and green things sweat a lot.

I had forgotten what hiking up a mountain was like. I hiked some of the White Mountains in the '80s, a couple decades earlier. Like walking upstairs for two or three hours straight. I've never made it to the Adirondacks but I still have hope.

I've never been on the Susquehanna but I have kayaked the Chemung which meets the Susquehanna in Athens. We usually stay in even smaller rivers than the Chemung. There's usually much more to see.

Oh heck, it's late, I'm tired, you get another picture. Panther Mountain was just a side trip. I was really on my way to Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome because I'm a big WWI plane buff. I was playing with some of the features on that camera. I think this setting was to represent a painting. The plane is a Spad VII modeled afdter the plane of Charles Guynemer, a leading French Ace.

Bruh he touch grass

I've been spending far too much time roaming the world lately. There's a live webcam at a man-made waterhole in the Namib Desert that keeps dragging me back. They post the times of interesting animals or events once a day, I think. Today it was around 4:00 PM their time, according to the timestamp in the upper right corner. Today I got to watch hyena pups, a porcupine sneeze, and an oryx charge charge a herd of ostriches. Yes, herd is correct, I looked it up. There are also zebras, warthogs, springboks, and various other critters. Even a couple barn owls occasionally.

Then there's this live cam in Denmark. It can get really zen-like in the winter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0GOOP82094

... or the Royal Albatross cam in New Zealand
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDhIv9iBzWk

... bald eagle nest in California (They lost their eggs this spring.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4-L2nfGcuE

... fish in the lower Florida Keys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi0mY6zVQnY

... and others like the Cornell Labs Bird Cams or Explore Oceans.

There's a wide world out there to explore. Enjoy it well. Treat it well.

That's what I tell people but nobody buys it. They can't see beyond their phone screen and nothing is real