2.3 Mile Walk at Five Rivers
Monday, December 28, 2009
My first thought for today was to head over the the Cohoes Falls/Waterford Flight of Locks area of the Mohawk River and see if we could spot any eagles... I've read in several places that they tend to hang out there in the winter because there's open water where they can get fish. Unfortunately, dark clouds were heading into town from that direction, and I really wanted to be in a bit of sunshine today... so I did an about face and headed off towards Delmar/Vorheesville instead, planning to visit either Thacher Park or Five Rivers. The wind hammering the car during the drive made the decision for us - the Helderberg escarpment would have been a very cold, uncomfortable choice - and early afternoon found us bundling up for a walk at Five Rivers.
There were deer in the orchard (presumably after the apples) when we arrived, which was fairly cool. From there we headed down to the Vlomankill Trail and walked along the stream, which had a decent amount of water flowing and big slabs of ice that had been dislodged during the rain a few days ago. Not much wildlife to see but it was still a nice walk with the water bubbling alongside the path.
After that we walked around the Beaver Pond, which was totally frozen over... no sign of beavers (presumably, they're snug in their lodge) and even the birds were pretty scarce. Some cool patterns in the ice, though. When we got back to the parking lot I suggested we check out the bird feeders, and on the way over we were surprised to see - a turkey! He was wandering around near the employee cars looking for food... very unusual. We snuck up on him, but it became clear pretty quickly that this was no typical turkey... instead of disappearing into the bushes as we got close, he kept wandering around looking for stuff to eat. So we wandered with him, tried to get him to take some food from our hands (someone had dumped a bunch of peanuts out, probably for the squirrels - the turkey didn't seem too interested in them) and I took a bunch of pictures. That's probably the closest I've ever been to a "wild" turkey - can't say they're the prettiest birds around, but the irridescence in his feathers when the sun hit them was quite spectacular.
Eventually we decided to leave him to his work (or maybe he was just waiting to cadge a ride to someplace warmer, who knows... he definitely hovered around the cars the whole time) and did a short walk along the woodlot trail. I wandered back over to the orchard to take more pictures of the deer, but they decided they'd had enough of people and took off fairly quickly. By then we were getting pretty chilly and it was getting a bit darker, so we hopped back in the car to head home.
On the way home I decided to pop over to Krumkill Road in hopes of getting some shots of the sunset... not much luck there, though I did get some nice pictures of the clouds from the hilltop near the red barn and a couple of great shots of the almost full moon.
JMH
