Tinicum

My wife and I decided to take a few days to play hooky with my extra time right now (well, extra in that I don’t have a 9-5 job to attend; I still have projects to work on). ANYHOO, tomorrow it is a trip to Cape May but today it was what was supposed to be a 2-hour trip to John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge (AKA Tinicum) to check out the local waterfowl migration.

Our luck wasn’t that great to start, as we mostly saw a buttload of tree swallows when we started. Still, Shari got a chance to take quite a few good shots, and we were off. We had both brought our cameras – her with the the Nikon D70 digital (which is why she HAS her pictures), and my with my Nikon N80 film camera, which is why I don’t have mine yet. And there are a lot of cool pictures to wait for.

She got some awesome shots of a Golden-Crowned Kinglet, a garter snake, a great blue heron and a bunch of other stuff. I’m hoping that mine are nearly as good. Even if they aren’t, we got to see some cool stuff. I added 3 new species to my life list (“geek alert!”):

• Palm Warbler
• Rusty Blackbird
• Northern Rough-winged Swallow

Shari added those, plus a few others like the Eastern Phoebe and Common Merganser. But the unrecorded highlights were seeing a Bald Eagle and a nesting Great Horned Owl. Oh, that and carrying my wimpy wife through the flooded trail on my back because she didn’t want to get her sneakers muddy. Just kidding – it was pretty flooded, and that water was colder and deeper than I expected. It was hard to sneak up on things after with me squish-squishing away. Oh well, I just hope that my boots dry out by tomorrow for the hike at Cape May!