In the Wheat

Yesterdays wind and rain start to abate as morning progresses.  I put in at the peak of high tide, about 1:00, and head across the bottom of the marsh, which at this tide level is open water with sparse patches of spartina scattered about.  The water is high enough that I can easily paddle through the grass if need be. Flooded as it is, there are almost no birds in sight for the distance, a bit short of a mile. I see just 2 Cormorants on that leg. The water is too deep for any of the wading birds.

I head into the Maze, a more intimate spot and a more likely place to spot birds. I find and take a narrow side passage that I haven't used in a few months. Up ahead, a good number of Egrets and Great Blue Herons take flight.  I'm too far off to have caused that and I wonder if there is someone else in here.  They've taken off from the usual hang out near the big drift log.  As I near, I spot a bunch of Snowy Egrets that were better hidden in the tall grass.  I figure the count to be about 50-60 Egrets, of which maybe 40% were Snowys, and about 10 Great Blue Herons.  It's a lot of large birds in a small area.

By this time, the predicted diminishing wind has undiminished into a steady 15mph gusting into the 20's.  I'll cut the trip short as I am starting to get pushed around.  I head in to the Central Phragmites Patch where I flush three mature Black Crowned Night Herons.  Note that I have not seen a single Yellow Crowned Night Heron today or in the last week or so.

I sit and write my notes at the Phragmites Patch.  

Listen to the wind blowing through the grass.

The marsh looks like a wheat field with the spartina gold and waving in the wind. 

Autumn has arrived

Windy weather and a day or two of being under the weather kept me off the water for a bit.  Today comes with canoe weather - sun, a light wind and a 70F temperature.  I take my getting out, but it seems that I'll have the very high tide timed well enough.

I put in on the Housatonic under the highway, then cut across beneath the drawbridge and head up river through the four islands.  The water is near slack and stays that way for about 2 miles. My tide timing isn't ideal and an opposing current starts growing as I near Fowler Island.  The last mile up river is against a fairly strong current. I spot an Osprey near Baldwin Landing. I often say that a few Osprey stay late in the year, but I really don't know if they stayed, or if the birds are migrating late from places farther north.  Anyway, there are usually a few Osprey around right up until winter.  A short distance further up and I flush an immature Bald Eagle, which I managed to paddle directly beneath without seeing.  

I cross the river and ride a following current back.  Unfortunately, a wind starts blowing upriver, which almost negates the effect of the current.  It is, however, no problem as it is such a fine day and I have most often had the river to myself.  

Cutting around the back side of the Quad Islands, I spot a pair of Great Egrets, which take to the air and head off as I near.   

Back to the Great Swamp

I coax M to go with me to the Great Swamp.  I guarantee that it does not take much convincing.  

The high will be 60F today with a chance of showers, although we should be off the water well before the rain arrives.  The sky is overcast and there is a light East wind.  The water level is a somewhat higher than normal, especially for this time of year, but the flow is all within the banks.

We have a nice talk with a couple women that have come down to the put-in, which is at the end of a quarter mile dead end dirt road.  One of them fills me in on the history of the quarry that you pass by on the way in, and also on a cabin that once was on Pine Island - built by a few WWII veterans that used it as their own art center.

We try our luck upstream, crossing one beaver dam and not getting much more than a quarter mile before coming up against a log jam that I didn't want to mess with.  That is a normal occurrence when paddling upstream of the start.  Sometimes it's a go, sometimes it ain't.  We turn around and head downriver.

Autumn is already here and the trees are going orange and red and the cattails have busted open, 

The upper section of the river is tight and twisty, but it mostly away from any trees that can fall and block the route. That is why we started at this upper put-in. Having not been in the marsh since May, I wanted to check out the conditions without dealing with downed trees that are more common in the lower half of this section.  

We  cross three low beaver dams on the way and continue down to the mid-point.  For a few years, there has been some downed trees to deal with near the halfway point and I wanted to check on the status. The tree tangle above the bridge has pretty much disappeared and the blocking log below the bridge has sunk below the surface.  The big jam farther down which has to be portaged is still there.  Someone has been cutting on it, but it will take a lot more cutting to finish the job.  With that, we head back.

Our bird count is a few Wood Ducks, a couple Great Blue Herons, a Hawk and a flock of Blue Jays.  It's not much, but this is the quiet time when birds from the North haven' arrived and the summer birds have headed South, at least that is the way I figure it. 

 

Tariffville - Pinchot Sycamore - Tariffville

It might be 2 years since I've been in this stretch of the river.  I used to come here often, especially when S was flying more often out of the airport that is just a few minutes away.  It is a beautiful day with mid-70 temperatures.  The wind is light but there is an afternoon weather front coming through and gusty conditions are predicted.  But, the wind direction will be with me on the return, when it counts.

I don't paddle very far before I remember just how peaceful this stretch is.  Once in awhile a road runs along the river, but more often there is nothing but forest and fields out beyond the 4-6 ft high cut bank.  The current at Tariffville is barely moving, but as I head upriver it eventually becomes the 2:1 flow that is typical (2 hours paddling against the current, 1 hour to return with the current). 

One thing that I don't remember is the wild rice. Maybe I wasn't paying attention on previous trips, or they were at the wrong time of the year, but there is a fair amount of wild rice growing along the bank. It is growing is slower water, often in patches that are 15 feet wide and run about a hundred feet along the bank.  There is still grain on much of the grass (it is actually a grass and not rice).  Good for the birds.

I flush a few Great Blue Herons and a couple of Hawks, and one large mature Bald Eagle. Otherwise, a few Mergansers, Kingfishers and Sandpipers... and a small flock of Canada Geese.  The river has never been great for wildlife, which is probably due to development, farms and golf courses that prevent a large enough patch for many animals to exist.  

Once I am an hour out, I start passing landmarks that I remember from previous trips.  A bit farther on, I begin to hear gunfire from a Police gun range in Simsbury.  That means I am nearing the Gifford Pinchot Sycamore, a large riverside sycamore tree named in honor of the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service.

At 2 hours and 10 minutes, I reach the sycamore and turn back.  It takes 1 hour and 20 minutes for the return. The wind picks up some while paddling back, but nothing near the predictions.

Bushwacking the Marsh

S coaxed me into heading over to the Wheeler Marsh. There was no early morning rush with the high tide coming sometime after two in the afternoon.  It was also a very high tide backed up by near calm air, 70F temperature and mostly overcast sky.  

We put in at the refuge lot giving us more time in the marsh and missing out on the flood current that would be against us if we started upriver under the highway bridge.  There did not seem to be anyone else in the entire marsh.

We started by heading around Cat Island.  I do this once or twice a year and it might be S's first time doing this.  The increasingly narrow channel eventually became a wall of phragmites, although there was still one to two feet of water beneath us.  Once you're into it, that stuff is more difficult to back out of than going forward.  We grunted and pushed and poled through until reaching the upriver side of the island.  S told me later that it was fun.

After that, we headed to the Central Phragmites Patch.  There are few birds in sight but the patch always has possibilities, and it did not disappoint.  We flushed about a dozen Black Crowned Night Herons. Two were immature, and although they look a lot like their Yellow Crowned kin, I'm pretty sure they were also Black Crowns.  

Then, we wandered internal channels.  With the high water nothing was particularly recognizable, but my mistakes were easily corrected by short cutting through the well flooded spartina to somewhere I intended us to be.  

As we headed back across to finish our trip, we spotted a Martin, the largest of the Swallows. It was climbing, then diving, then carving a tight turn.  Clearly it was feeding, chasing airborne insects. Once we focused on the bird and paid close attention, we could spot the flying insects that it was chasing.  I'm pretty sure it was hunting Monarch Butterflies.  The Martin gave us a good show.

Osprey

Two Osprey are circling over Goose Bay.  Most of the Osprey have left for places south, but there are always a few that stay around right up until "real" winter arrives.  I don't, as far as an Osprey goes, see the reason for Osprey to leave so soon other than they have someplace else to be.  Perhaps some of them go because all the other Osprey are doing it.  The holdouts fascinate me.  They seem to be the rebels that do their own thinking.

It is partly sunny when I head out from Pilgrim's Landing.  The wind is something under 10mph coming downriver and the temperature is climbing up through the 60's.  The tide is coming in and the water is already fairly high.  No one else is around. 

This is the first canoeable day since Wednesday.  A Nor' Easter came through, which the news made out to be something like the end of the world.  As long as you don't live on a sandbar next to the ocean, it was not a big deal, just 3 days of 40+ mph wind and a ordinary amount of rain.  

Lord's Cove is a large marsh, partly fresh and partly brackish. There are two entrances, both of them on the downstream end. Route finding is not difficult with side route choices being either dead ends or loops that return to the main route.  The oddity is a big open pond called Coute's Hole, which is well in the marsh. It is near circular and 200 yards in diameter.  The main paddle route is in a channel that runs around the feature.  All the various theories for the "hole", one of which is as a meteor strike, have no evidence.  The hole is not particularly deep either, in case you were wondering.  One thing for sure, it defies common sense thinking about rivers and marshes. 

With the high water level, I refresh my memory taking some of the more obscure side channels that I haven't been through in quite a while.  I also head into Coute's Hole.  The hole has three entrances, one on the west and the others on the north, and all of them fairly close to others.  It is otherwise surrounded by a solid wall of cattails.  

I find about 50 Teal in the uppermost finger.  Otherwise, the already mentioned Osprey, a couple Kingfishers, a couple Great Blue Herons, in Goose Bay, some Great Egrets and a couple of Terns that I could not identify.  A small flock of Canada Geese flew over - I will never tire of their call. 

On the way out, I circled the shore of Goose Bay, just to make the trip last a bit longer.   

Doing the Wash

It is the time of the autumn winds. The forecast is for 10-15mph wind for the foreseeable future.  But, these fall season winds often have a mind of their own and just as often as strong gusty days might show up, an afternoon or morning might go calm.  Such is life.  It is about 70F and cloudy.

I put in at Indian Well on the reach I call Housatonic 2, which is above the Derby Dam and below the Stevenson Dam.  It is not my favorite place to paddle, having a busy road on one side and a bit too mny shoreline houses, but it is near home and being in a forested valley it can be a good paddle on a windy day.

I put in and the wind is coming in gusts up the river, close to being exactly the opposite direction of the forecast, which is a NE wind.  I cross the river to the east side and find it near calm.  Up river I go.

I flush a Great Blue Heron from the bank.  It does this twice. Herons often do this, short flights up and away from the oncoming canoe until, at some point, they circle around and return to near where they were first seen.  At the second stop, I avoid direct eye contact and slip by just 3 canoe lengths away without flushing the bird.  Add to that another Heron, a couple Kingfishers, an immature Bald Eagle and a dozen or so non-migratory Canada Geese.  Add to that two guys fishing from an aluminum boat and a rowing Shell. That's the traffic report.

I head up an hour, to just below the shelf, then turn and head back.  I feel washed.