Plum Island

One cool Sunday afternoon in early October, I got the chance to spend a few hours at the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island, near Newburyport, Massachusetts.

I had just started out walking from the gate house area when I saw a fox -- as I watched for awhile, he pranced and zigzagged through the grass, looking up every so often.




In one of the pools along the road, I saw two juvenile mute swans. They ignored me and everyone else who stopped to take pictures.





The cloudy overcast skies made it difficult to positively identify these birds from their silhouettes.




There are several long, undulating boardwalks that stretch across the dunes area from the road to the beach

and back to the road again.





While there was still a lot of green, fall was beginning to show in the brown and bronze grasses.
There were quite a few other people out, some on bikes, some walking and jogging, others driving slowly along the road in their cars. But at the end of the road, just before I turned back, I saw this image -- a woman just sitting quietly at the end of a boardwalk, enjoying the fresh salt air and the peaceful ocean view.

Sunrise and chasing the waves

We make frequent visits to a friend in Hampton, NH. From the balcony of his condo on the first day of September, we had a great view of the gorgeous sunrise over the beach (and of course the utility wires -- pretend they're not there).

And then later in the day, as the light was fading, I took a walk along the beach. There were a few other people out there, some with their dogs, just quietly strolling along.

But parts of the beach were quite busy. The semipalmated plovers






and the sanderlings were chasing the waves and finding all those yummy little invertebrates in the wet sand.





The light reflecting off the wet sand made some interesting patterns.