A place to share your thoughts, questions, trip reports for all sorts of kayaking: Whitewater, Sea Kayaking, Rock Gardening, Fishing, Surfing, Squirt, etc
I love mornings like this
That looks great. How long did you go out for? See any cool birds?
I had a super choppy and windy day yesterday, followed by a hardscrabble fight up a tight, overly vegetated river in the backyard of a main highway and an industrial park. A lot of porting and branches to the face. Definitely type 2 fun lol.
That was a couple weeks ago and ended up paddling around the lake for six miles and roughly 6 hours. I don't remember seeing any birds but I always see herons and ducks.
Just to the left is a peninsula without any houses or anything that always sounds like is home to millions of birds hidden in the trees. Nearby is a small island that has a lot of big nests in the trees and I've seen bald eagles there too. I don't know if they lived there or were raiding nests or what, but this is the only photo I got.
That's awesome! Thanks so much for the detailed response and photo.
I love paddling past herons. They look like dinosaurs as they quietly take off.
A bald eagle is a great find.
They sound like dinosaurs too!
Great point! I heard one only once, and I remember it being super jarring. I'm always kind of amazed by how silently and smoothly they glide through the air.
One early morning at the lake last year I heard what sounded like a herd of velociraptors feeding. It was an unholy screeching sound that echoed across the lake. I paddled around the point and saw the top of a tree shaking in the distance. There was something near the top making a ruckus. Soon a heron flew in and landed right next to the ruckus and two other herons moved a couple feet so I could see it was them making all the noise.
I guess the two were mating and the third flew in to watch or something. He was right next to them but he soon flew to another branch a few feet away to give them a little distance. The two noisy herons started either fighting or doing a mating dance or something. That's when I got this video. There are lake houses nearby and I know the birds must have woken a lot of people up.
Wow! That's an amazing video and story. Thanks for sharing. If I woke up to those noises, I'd for sure be baffled.
Fighting or mating lol. No idea either, but I love any animal where the two acts are hardly distinguishable.