the Way of the Turtle

2.5 Mile Walk at Turning Point Park & Ontario Beach Park
Monday, February 16, 2008

Another day of deciding where to go, since the weather turned out to be sunny after all... ended up heading over to Turning Point Park to walk the Genesee Riverway Trail boardwalk through the Genesee Turning Basin (that's a mouthful!)

The hill down to the river was a bit icy but we made it without mishap... I wasn't counting on the wind blasting along the water, though, which made it a good deal colder than I expected. So it goes... out on the ice we saw a huge flock of gulls, along with a few ducks... tried tossing them some bird seed, but they didn't get it, guess they're used to larger chunks of food! Further away on the river was a flock of birds with white bodies and black heads. We'd left the binoculars in the car, but at first Ann thought they were terns and I thought they might be bufflehead. Looking at my pictures after we got home, I figured out that we were both wrong - they were mergansers (which was a "duh!" moment for me, given how many mergansers I've seen on the Mohawk... I should have figured it out fairly easily. Maybe my brain was frozen.)

We turned back around 3/4 of the way along the boardwalk; it was just too cold and it didn't seem likely we'd see much else. Since home was a good 30 minutes away, we decided to head up to Ontario Beach Park to use the restrooms and maybe briefly check out the lake and the beach.
No surprise we saw lots of gulls and ducks, especially in one sunny area along the river. We wandered down to the concrete jetty and spent a few minutes watching the waves come rolling in and splash against the mound of ice that built up along the edge of the beach.

Ann decided to get rid of the rest of the bird seed, so we started out giving some to the ducks (the gulls were interested to but didn't have much luck finding the seed.) And then a flock of pigeons descended on us... at one point I had a group all around me feet chomping up every bit of seed they could find. It was pretty funny to watch... I do wish we'd brought some old bread so we would have had something for the gulls and ducks, but we still had a good time feeding them what we did have.

JMH