Thursday, October 6, 2011

crab-and-jellyfish, dolphins, alligator: a typical day

On today’s agenda: an hour and a half ass-kicking yoga class:
Vinyasa Flow: Our signature class! A dynamic blend of strength, sweat and spirituality that will detoxify, heal and electrify. This sequence will strengthen and tone the muscles of your body and mind, and is sure to take you to your edge.
Duly detoxed, healed, electrified, strengthened, toned, and drop-kicked off the edge, I followed this up with a strenuous two hours of deck chair asana, which is not for the faint of heart. I put my all into it. By mid-afternoon, I was ready for the next adventure: a kayak tour of yet another chunk of heretofore unexplored estuaries.
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The sibs, with just the baseball cap of our guide in between.
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Reason #1 to get an SLR camera to supplement the point-and-shoot: a blurry great egret. I should note, s/he was not blurry in real life. S/he was quite in focus, actually, croaking indignantly at us as we gingerly made our way through the high tide waters and spartina. We also annoyed a great blue heron.
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Speaking of Spartina, here it is having just flowered.Woo hoo!

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FAIL: this was supposed to be an awesome close-up of an immense blue dragonfly eating a monarch butterfly. Not only did I miss the shot, but my presence disturbed things enough so that wham, the dragonfly took off, and the butterfly corpse exploded, with pieces landing in the bottom of my kayak.
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Like so.

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Cool. Sad, but cool. Dragonfly’s gotta eat.
And now for the fun part. Here’s a wee tiny jellyfish.
P1150927These don’t sting. And, bonus, this little one is perfectly alive and happy, scooped up by our guide, Jesse. She explained that certain species of crabs have a little loveshack arrangement going on with these jellyfish. (Yeah, my terminology here.) They both eat the same kinda stuff. So sometimes crabs hang out up under the lid (yeah…my terminology again…) of the jellyfish, to eat with their host…
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She rummaged around the hapless beastie to show us.

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See the crab??? There were two of ‘em in there.
Then we made our way towards a huge pod of dolphins proceeding through their late afternoon lunch. We parked ourselves where they’d go right by us, and they did: going under us, and then surfacing – at one point, three at a time, doing a partial breech. Heaven.
Capture
Reason #2 for plotting the purchase of the next camera: I want a super-duper telephoto lens with stop-action capability.

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We visited about a dozen pelicans. They glided by serenely.
A fine day. Tomorrow will be even better, because Best Beloved’s joining us. Hooray! Oh: one last piece of news. The alligator’s back on the other side of the lagoon now.
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Whew.
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But the local heron took its place right in front of our driveway.

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