Back in the Shephaug

It is a pleasant day, supposed to hit the upper 50's with some sun and only light winds.  I put in at the long cove, a former creek until the area was dammed.  Most of my route today will be over an old railroad bed, although I won't see any evidence until I am more than an hour out, where the rail bed finally meets the artificially raised level of the water.  In the meanwhile, I scan the forest hillsides for old stone walls.  With the leaves and brush down, and a bit of good sunlight, the walls are obvious.  Stone walls are the dominant man-made feature of New England, and most of these are near 200 years old.  When they were built, most of the forest had been leveled for pasture land - no farmer with half a brain built a stone wall if they had suitable wood nearby to build a rail fence, and wire fencing doesn't arrive until after the Civil War.  Then, as the pasture land was overgrazed, more rocks came to the surface and were added to existing walls or used for new walls.  A lot of this pasture land was for merino sheep, which had been smuggled from Portugal and Spain in the early 19th century, in case you were wondering.

Note the stone wall on the hillside.  It runs about a mile without break

I head down and round the point into the Shephaug arm flushing a few Common Mergansers along the way.  They are paired up now, and the groups are mostly two to four ducks. I follow the shore close enough that i can see well back into the trees.  No one else is out save a couple of fishing boats.  

I pause my paddling for a second and realize that the whole forest is singing.  It is a large flock of very small song birds and it takes me a few moments before I can locate one.  Unfortunately, I can't get a zoom on one with my camera, so I cannot identify them.  Their twittering chatter is also a language that I am unfamiliar with.  I paddle off and leave them behind, and the forest goes silent again.  Soon, I come across another flock.

Up at the last two bends before the cascades, I spot two pairs of Wood Ducks, a Kingfisher, and an Osprey.

I turn back at the cascades.  Above them is a deep gorge of rapids that even the whitewater paddlers don't go into, as there is no way to scout the rapids from shore and there is no way out of the gorge in the event of a swim.

I return following the same route.  I spot two Great Blue Herons, a Vulture and another Osprey.  I stop to write my notes under another flock of those songbirds.  Again, I cannot get a good photo of them.  While I write, the entire flock flies off and the forest goes silent.