The Urge to be Someplace Else

I ran into a baby boom over at John Prince Park on one of my paddling trips the other day. 

This large county park, real close to my house in Lantana, FL, has always been my year-round, go-to spot for birds, but it was only last spring, when Covid kept me pinned in Florida through the winter for the first time since I’d retired, that I realized it was also a pretty good nesting spot in April and May. 

Last spring I discovered a bunch of baby green heron hanging out around the dead-end lagoon over close to Congress Avenue and JFK hospital.  There aren’t any babies visible back there yet this year, but judging from the amount of adults I saw last week there should be a bumper crop of green heron young coming along soon.

But back to the babies that are there now.  On the boring, mundane side there was this family of Egyptian geese.   See more about these geese here.

More exciting to me were the large nests in the tall Australian pines lining the water south of the Sixth Avenue South bridge.  I had looked up there to watch the pelicans that usually roost precariously on the thin branches with their webbed feet.

Looking closer I realize there were blue heron adults on two of the nests and in one there was a baby or two.  This is the first time I’ve seen blue heron nesting in the park.   I’d seen blue heron scrounging for nesting material in the tiny patch of scrubby land next to my house several weeks ago but until now didn’t know where the nest building was happening. (Just click on any photo to scroll through the larger images)

Even more fun were the limpkin babies.  I’ve seen babies around in previous years, even in my backyard, but I was lucky enough to see a youngster being fed. Limpkins feed mainly on snails, which they find by pushing their beaks around into the bottom in shallow water. 

In this instance, the baby would wait on the shoreline while the adult went wading out to find food.  The adult brought the snail back to the shore, extracted the meat of the snail and gave it to the youngster.

I’d like to say I hid in the shallows in my canoe for days, subsisting on crackers and water and peeing in a jar, to get these photos, but the reality is that I was loading the canoe on the car, walked around to the back to get some rope and there they were, fifteen feet away.  Sitting limpkins so to speak.

Here’s a shot of an adult limpkin with a small snail (and a bit of weed stuck to it):

And here’s a couple photos of a baby limpkin. Coincidentally, baby limpkins go through the same frizzy phase my granddaughter Margeaux went through about ten years ago, so I’ve tossed in some photos of that.

In the gallery below are some up close and personal shots of adult and baby. This is what happened every time the adult returned to the shore with a snail. The baby kept an eagle eye on the adult’s beak as it extracted the meat of the snail and passed it off to the baby. The snail itself is down in the grass and not visible, but in a couple of the photos you can see the snail meat in the baby’s mouth. Click on any image and you can scroll through the larger versions of all of them.

And, finally, we saw a flasher in the park. I’ve been mooned by a blue heron before (photo included below) but this flashing was a first.

OOPS. I’ve forgotten to include some photos of the green heron over at the park who I hope are busy getting ready to have babies. Here they are:

But let’s continue the baby theme, in a different locale, I spotted a baby American oystercatcher a couple days ago with an adult on one of the islands along the eastern shore of the intercoastal south of the Lake Worth Bridge.  There were two babies, but they scattered to the weeds really fast and this was the only shot I got. Following is a gallery of some of the other shots of the day.

And finally, the house below on the western shoreline caught my eye.  I had seen one like it on my trip down the Mississippi River in 2003, north of Minneapolis. 

So I found that 2003 photo in my files.  Here it is, with the photo of the West Palm house. Very close design, different sizes.

Starting now I can slip into a little afternoon nap and no one will be the wiser. 

Granddaughter Simone has gifted me with my very own pair of Napping Glasses. 

Sleeping?  Not me!

My old neighborhood in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is getting a facelift!  Even the apartment building I lived in for a couple years has a new coat of paint.

Located in the old Piazza section of town, that three-story building was probably twenty years old when I moved into it in 1968, but even at that it was the newest and most modern structure on the block.   I lived on the ground floor, which is now a beer store.

Back then it was surrounded by a sea of one-story, tin-roofed, mud-walled shanties.  Today, that building, and a similar one near it, are the only things standing.

The Piazza district has always been the liveliest, if not the most modern, area in Addis Ababa.  Fifty years ago the city was basically an overgrown village and the Piazza was the social and commercial heart of it.  Modernization, of course, has come to many areas of Addis and it has grown considerably, but the Piazza hadn’t changed much—until now.

What’s happening around my old apartment building is part of a billion-dollar project to clean up the several rivers flowing through Addis Ababa.  This includes the Bantiketu River watershed, which cuts through the Piazza district on its way south from Entoto Mountain to the Akaki River south of town.    Just a few steps from my apartment it flows under the Ras Makonnen Bridge.

Just cleaning waterways that have been used as public laundry, restroom, bath, and industrial waste and sewer outflow since the town began is a massive project.  Add to that the envisioned public space and walkway systems in the plan and I think the job will take way longer than the planned three years.

Nice to know that if I ever moved back into that building I’d have a waterfront view!

Below are two Google Earth views of my neighborhood. The first shows what the area looked like when I lived there and the second shows the area today. My apartment building is circled in red and the river appears as a green line.

Here’s another aerial view (south is up), with my building circled in red.

And below are two shots of the building. The first I took at the end of 2018 when my daughter and I visited Ethiopia. Land clearing had already begun. The second was taken by a friend, Bruk Ezra, just a couple weeks ago, showing the new paint job.

And below are some links to more information about the river project in Addis Ababa:

Addis Ababa launches a 29 billion birr mega project to make the city’s riverbanks green public parks – YouTube

Addis Ababa builds resilience with clean rivers, public spaces and walkways | InfoNile

News Analysis: Addis Abeba Rivers and Riversides: old project, new name and a billion dollar bill. Will it work? – Addis Standard

I don’t remember how I ended up with a patch of aloe in my front yard.  Maybe my father?  He used to enjoy planting random stuff in my Florida yard when he’d visit.  And he also enjoyed pulling up random stuff.  Like “weeds” that weren’t.

He never did come to terms with our common grass down here—St. Augustine or Floratam—which is eerily similar to the crabgrass he spent a lifetime picking out of his yards in the Midwest.

At any rate, my little patch of aloe probably began as a plant or two.  They propagated well in the otherwise unused territory under the frangipani tree in the front yard and I happily let them do so, rightly figuring that they’d come in handy every year or so when someone touched a hot pan and needed a handy, effective salve for the burn.

And once I realized they’d flower occasionally and not only look pretty but also attract hummingbirds, the patch became a welcomed, permanent fixture in the landscape, in spite of the difficulty of weeding a patch of plants with long, stiff leaves armed with sharp needles.

My plants are the widely know species of the genus Aloe called Aloe Vera, originally from the Arabian Pennisula.  You’ll see the name, of course, on a variety of pharmaceutical products.

It’s been a while since I’ve bored you with a photo of an old gas station but on my jaunts between Florida and Connecticut this fall I discovered one worth pointing out.

It’s on a corner in Wilmington NC.  The nice classic form is still intact.  I am hoping it’s been stripped down in preparation for a good renovation and not for the wrecking ball.

I’ve never seen one in quite this stage of deconstruction (reconstruction?) before.  “Its bones were picked clean” is the cliché that springs to mind.

A few more recent finds are below.  There’s the Auto Title Loans office in Georgetown SC, the Barrier Islands Salt Company in Cheriton VA, the Carolina Cider Company in Yemassee SC, Custom Upholstery in Chocowinnity NC, and the Upper Room Cafe in Beaufort SC.

To see my entire collection go here.

Warning:  Objects in your windshield may appear closer than they are. 

Windmill in the hills of southern Pennsylvania. To offer some perspective, the hub of this machine is as big as a bus.

This one evokes some nice feelings.  A pleasant country road running atop a ridge named Apple Pie because there used to live along there in a small cottage a kindly old woman who made great apple pies.

There’s an Apple Pie Ridge Road in Stephensen, Gainsboro, and Winchester VA; in Wellsburg WV, and in Alto and Baldwin, GA.  This one’s in Baldwin.

One of my favorite places to paddle in the Northeast is on the Swift River below the Quabbin Reservoir in Belchertown in central Massachusetts.   

I like it as much for the human-made river art along it as I do for its gentle current and narrow, twisty turns.

It’s not a long paddle.  Put in at Cold Spring Street and go upstream a few miles until you are stopped by the current, shallow water, blowdowns, or groups of fly fisherpersons and then paddle downstream to the dam and back up to the launch.  It’s a pleasant few hours.

Because the river comes out of the bottom of the deep and large Quabbin Reservoir the water is delightfully cold in the heat of the summer and relatively warm enough in the winter that most of it doesn’t freeze over—or so say some of my hardier Northeastern friends.

Three branches of the Swift used to course through the Swift River Valley, passing several small towns and joining up to become one river that emptied into the Ware River just north of Three Rivers, MA.  That all changed pretty drastically in the 1930s, when two dams were built, towns were moved and the valley flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir, Massachusetts’ biggest inland lake and a water source, through an aqueduct, for Boston and 40 of its suburbs 65 miles to the east.   Water in the Quabbin Aqueduct actually flows uphill for part of its route through natural siphoning action.

That changed the landscape!  The process took a long time.  It was first envisioned in 1893.  The work started in 1930, the damming was completed in 1939 and the valley finally filled with water in 1946.  Along the way, the politicians in Boston were happy, the Swift River Valley residents were unhappy, buildings and cemeteries were moved, and four towns–Greenwich, Prescott, Dana, and Enfield–ceased to exist.   

And 75 years later it all looks so natural and permanent, like nothing ever happened!  Except for some old roads that dead end at the water’s edge and the occasional basement cavity that wasn’t filled in.

But back to the point of this.  One or two of the households along the river enjoy yard art as much as I do and have the advantage of a river bank to use as a setting.  Here’s a collection of the pieces I have seen in my half-dozen times on the river.

This dragon was new to me this year…

…and so were these guys…

…and this collection.

The couple below has been around for a while. One year in the early spring when I floated by they were still covered with a tarp protecting them from the snow. That care has paid off. On the left as they appeared several years ago and on the right what they look like now. The paint job has held up well.

This dragonfly, however, has lost some of its wing fabric over the years.

Sadly, the folks below weren’t around in any form this year…