15 July 2023

Last week at Cape Cod I came away with many impressions and a few photos of things-that-stand-still. The clouds above Cape Cod Bay and the shallow waves at low tide made a pretty picture on 11 July.

Bird photos are beyond my cellphone’s capability so I’ve borrowed from Wikimedia Commons to illustrate. The Best Birds without a doubt were piping plovers and their chicks at Sea Gull Beach. So cute!

The most common songbird on the Cape is the gray catbird — as common as robins are in Pittsburgh.

Ospreys were always overhead. Most of them had nestlings getting ready to fledge.

Best Insect was an ebony damselfly seen at Stony Brook Mill Site with Bob Kroeger who took this photo.

Cape Cod has *lots* of rabbits everywhere. I didn’t think to take a photo when a rabbit was nearby. Can you see it in dappled shade in the middle of this photo?

The flowers on this spotted wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata) had not yet opened on 6 July.

A Life Flower: American cow-wheat (Melampyrum lineare) in the dry upland pine forest at Wellfleet Bay. Amazingly it is semi-parasitic with leaves for photosynthesis and roots for pulling nutrients from pines, poplars, sugar maples, red oaks and low-bush blueberries.

Greenery we never see in Pittsburgh –> seaweed.

Our family prefers the beaches on Cape Code Bay where there’s lots of space to spread out at low tide. At high tide all but the far edge is underwater.

And the waves are shallow like those at Lake Erie.

At the end of our stay it was 90 degrees for a couple of days. Not so much fun in the sun. Though it’s nice to travel I’m glad to be home.

(photos by Kate St. John, Bob Kroeger and from Wikimedia Commons)