Day 359

Since there is less than a week left of this project, I want to finish it by taking photos of some of my favorite natural things from the project. While outside a restaurant, our daughter noticed this tree had no leaves. After further inspection via a lens, I realized it was a dead pine tree. There were a sparse amount of dead pine needles left on these spiky branches.

Day 232

Today Alex and I went to the pool.

There are hawks that live in our forest and marsh area.

Day 100

Yay, I've reached 100 days!!!! This is a photo heavy post, but that is sort of fitting. I'm making them a large size, but if you click on the photos, you will see a much large size. If there are errors with this many photos showing, please let me know.

John surprised Alex and I with a trip to Pony Pasture today. Pony Pasture is a stop along the James River. You can walk along the banks on paths. There are also areas you can climb on rocks to get closer to the water. This is great in the summer and also great if you are like me, and want to take photos. Today, there were a lot of ducks. They were very friendly and were comfortable coming close. Of course, I'm quiet and let them do what ever they want. Alex however, is loud and kept quacking at them, so I made her go play with John instead of duck watching with me. She kept making them swim away. Anyway, to start, here are a lot of duck photos and a couple stop motion movies.

This duck loved to sit on this rock. He would swim around and then waddle up on the rock.

Ducks swimming. This is a bit down river. You can also see a seagull flying. There were hundreds of them sitting on the rocks.

A bit further up river, where the rock loving duck was, there was a female one. In this photo, she is eating from the bottom of the river.

The two males were fighting over the female. Tis' the season I suppose. Their quacking made Alex quack.

Three ducks eating.

The three ducks had swam around this large rock. They used the rapids to get back over to the area they mostly stayed in. It was amusing to watch them go down the rapids.

These are the three ducks swimming.

The river upstream

The river downstream

These are seagulls on the rocks an flying.

These are some rapids. I thought a stop motion movie would show their rhythm well. 

I liked the striped in this fallen tree.

This is an overgrown bridge.

Before we got to Pony Pasture, we headed over the Huguenot bridge. I was a passenger, so I got to take photos of the beautiful river.

Heading the other way on the bridge, I took a photo of the trees lining the train tracks.

These are my two helpers. Alex (the human) helps me detect pretty sunrises. Pippi (the cat) helps me detect birds, squirrels and moths.

Day 80

Today, I went to Pony Pasture with Alex, Amanda Erickson and her friend Alan. We spent abou 2 hours exploring the river and the park. I took a lot of photos. Though I narrowed the 200+ photos to these, there are still a lot, so phone users beware...

Pony Pasture is on the James River, so lets start with a photo of the James River from Pony Pasture. As you can see, there are a lot of rocks. Being able to see them indicates that the water level is low. In the summer, this is good for lounging in the water, but not for tubing or rowing down the river.

Another shot of the river.

While we were exploring by the river, there were tree Mallard Ducks...two males and one female. One of the males came close to us. The water here is clear enough, that his feet are visible.

This is one of the male ducks hunting for food. Don't you love that duck butt!

There are two geese. On the rocks behind them (not in the photo) are lots of seagulls. The gulls were too far away for my camera to properly photograph them.

I was poking around the rocks and noticed this fern growing from one.

I liked these tree roots. They change color (probably from wear on the bark, due to people stepping on them) as they go into the water.

I love seeing moss grow in dead trees. It shows that life still goes on even in death.

This is the lovely Amanda taking a photo, as I photograph her. This is in the park area. There are lots of trees and trails. The way we came into this area looked overgrown and dead like some freaky horror movie...but still we entered. It was worth it.

See overgrown and creepy.

While taking a photo of this weird seed ball, I got caught on the surrounding briers. The briers weren't part of this seed plant, a small branch of the plant had landed on the brier bush. I was told not to lag behind or I'll get caught in the briers again...hehe.

We came to an area of a trail that had drainage issues. This made for mud and pretty photos. I liked that there was a reflection of trees and the depth of the leaves in the water was visible. I now love seeing wet leaves, because the undertones of the browns are very clear and beautiful.

This is sort of a double reflection, due to the break in the flow of water. I like that the height of the tree is reflected and connects to the trees each reflection comes from.

In the parking lot, there was a section with a large puddle of water. I thought this reflection showed the beauty in what is not normally seen as beautiful.