Sunday, May 8, 2011

Buford Hatchery

Today is Mother's Day, and we all took it easy - just a little fishing at the pond.

Last time we were there, a family of geese emerged from the woods a few minutes before we left. They were there again today.

 Goose Family

This time the girls brought bread to feed them. At first they were hissing at us and trying to scare us away, then they were really excited about getting fed, and then they alternated back and forth between the two. They'd try to scare us until we'd throw them a bit of bread, then they'd be all happy until they remembered that they needed to scare us again. Hilarious. Bipolar geese.

We fished for about two hours and everybody caught something. I caught two catfish.

 Catfish

It was cool. I rigged up my line and chose bait with the specific intent of catching catfish and then I caught two. Maybe I'm finally making some progress. Now if I can only figure out how to catch a bigger catfish.

We saw two different cottonmouths. I saw ten thousand of them growing up in Louisiana, but they were all so huge that they were just totally black, so that's what I think of when I think of a cottonmouth; a huge black snake. Around here they don't get that big and they mostly keep their coloration. It's like a whole different snake.

Kathryn saw a mole digging around too and the kids were amazed.

 Mole

You could sit there and watch while the ground bumped up at the end of the track, over and over. Fascinating.

I dig our little pond. There's always some kind of interesting wildlife roaming around.

I'd half planned on taking the kids out roaming around in the woods somewhere afterward, but we couldn't get sufficiently motivated and I ended up spending a couple of hours reorganizing the music on my iPhone so it would let me take more than 10 photos at a time.

It was a good, lazy day.

2 comments:

  1. Hey, Dave. DNR will tell you that there are no cottonmouths around here. Are you sure that's what it was? This isn't their range, but as we know, animals don't always cooperate (i.e. the armadillo!)

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  2. Now that I look at some photos on the web, it may have been a Midland Water Snake. It was heavy bodied, with similar markings to a cottonmouth, but apparently they are frequently mistaken for each other. I even noticed at the time that it didn't have the little stripe leading back from the eye that I've heard is characteristic of a cottonmouth, but I couldn't think of anything else that it could be. It's good to know that cottonmouths aren't found up here. It's like the only snake I ever saw in Louisiana. Ten million of them.

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