Monday, November 16, 2015

LAW 52: Indian Summer and dead fish

One of the greatest gifts inherent in life as a self-employed artist is the extreme flexibility of 'the schedule', or well, pretty much lack of aforementioned abomination. We realized after breakfast that it was indeed going to be a drop dead gorgeous fall day, so we promptly decided that spending a couple of hours at Marshy Point Nature Center hiking was a much better idea than doing maintenance on the boat, so off we went.
View from the bridge at Marshy Point

Marshy Point is less than five miles from us and is truly a wonderful place. it has a great center with all sorts of programs for kids of all ages, many miles of well maintained trails that border on the upper reaches of the Chesapeake Bay. It is a real gem, a little bit of wild and wet set in the urban environment of Baltimore. We try to go there at least once a week. Even though we live pretty much as close as we possibly can to nature, well sometimes its important to get even closer.
From the bridge looking out to Gunpowder Falls

Marshy point abuts a portion of the Gunpowder Falls park system, also a wonderful Baltimore treasure.
Vernal Pond in spring

We hiked the Vernal Pond trail today, the first time since it was opened  this spring that we were able to hike around it without getting our feet wet. i guess thats why they call it …..

The downside of living as close as we do to the Chesapeake Bay is we get to see first hand all of the problems generated by 'civilization'. Lets face it, there's just to damn many of us, and we don't think abut what we're doing to our environment. The Middle River and all of its tributaries, including Hopkin's Creek(where we dock) is experiencing a HUGE fish die off. We noticed it Saturday morning. We had a very low tide and as we were walking the bulkheads with friends we saw literally thousands of dead fish. Our normally very abundant and beautiful fish population was all lying dead on the bottom of the river. Why? Well, higher than average temperatures along with fertilizer run-off spawned a toxic algae bloom. Bye bye Rockfish, etc.


Vernal Pond today, notice, no water





No comments:

Post a Comment