Assateague Island

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Since I've been on a vacation photo kick lately, here's another slideshow from coastal Virginia, this time from the south end of Assateague Island National Seashore and the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge next door. After I checked in to my Chincoteague Island hotel, I decided I wanted to at least dip my feet in the Atlantic a little, so off to the beach I went. Assateague Island is the ocean-facing barrier island due east of Chincoteague Island, and the two are separated by a channel of shallow water and salt marshes. So it's a bit of a drive, with a few sights here and there to stop and take photos of, which I of course did. At the beach itself, well, I'm not really keen to be That Guy who lugs a big camera around at the beach, taking photos of who knows what. That's right up there with White Van Metal Detector Guy in the rogues' gallery of suspicious-looking beach denizens. So I switched to phone photos, and didn't take a lot of those either, since I actually don't like having people in my photos and it was hard to avoid there.

Atlantic barrier island beaches like this are all variations on a simple theme: Long flat straight expanses of sand, a low rise behind the beach with some low shrubs (assuming developers haven't had their way with the place), and behind that a wide expanse of salt marsh between the barrier island and the mainland. So the beach here reminded me a lot of the Canaveral National Seashore down in Florida, which I already had photos of. I did the toes-in-the-nice-warm-Atlantic thing though, which was the main goal here. Ahead of photos, even, if you can believe that.

If the names "Assateague" and "Chincoteague" sound familiar, it's either from avidly reading my other blog posts here of late, or more likely from the famous series of young adult books about the islands' wild ponies. I never read any of the Misty books as a kid, but I seem to recall grade school classmates being obsessed with them. And then begging their parents for ponies of their own, probably. The books, while fictional, were based roughly on real people, horses, places, and events. If only I'd done a little more research ahead of time, I would've learned that two of the famous horses, "Misty" and "Stormy", were taxidermied and are now on display at the ranch where they once lived. This seems like a hilarious bit of macabre bad taste. If only I'd known, I would have carved out a bit of time to go visit the former children's book stars in their, um, retirement. I mean, where else can you see something like this? It's not like they've taxidermied the former stars of the Harry Potter movies, at least not so far. Not giggling would be the hard part. Or at least not giggling to a disruptive degree.

Every year, ponies from the island are herded and made to swim across the channel to Chincoteague Island (even though there's a perfectly decent bridge they could walk across) to be auctioned as a fundraiser for the local fire department. This has become the area's largest annual tourist event. I understand the need for some sort of herd management. As in the Western US, wild horses are an introduced species with no natural predators. Furthermore they're an introduced species that the public has become attached to, so removing them isn't a viable option. Thanks to the lack of predators, the unchecked population grows until it outstrips the local food supply, and the public won't stand for starving horses any more than it would accept the absence of horses. So they've taken to auctioning "excess" horses every year, to keep the herd size manageable. (Which is what the BLM does in Oregon and other western states, somewhat controversially.) The pony herd on the Maryland part of the island (kept separate from the Virginia ponies by a fence) is on birth control, believe it or not, which keeps the size of the herd down in a somewhat less picturesque way.

This business about ponies is not really a digression, because one of the books ("Stormy, Misty's Foal") centers around the real-life Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962, which also played a key role in the protection of the National Seashore. Much of the island had been platted for development, roads had been built, and some construction had begun when the storm swept through and flattened everything. Instead of rebuilding everything at taxpayer expense, which is what usually happens, the federal government acquired the island and handed it over to the National Park Service to run as a public beach park. Possibly this was due in part to sentimental attachment to the ponies. It's not clear what would have become of them if Assateague Island had been converted into vacation homes and trinket shops.

The adjacent wildlife refuge protects an extensive area of salt marshes, along with the historic 142' Assateague lighthouse (both of which I have photos of), and inland parts of the island where the local pony herd tends to hang out, which apparently are closed to the public. The lighthouse was closed for renovation when I was there; I didn't really mind since I've never really had a thing for lighthouses. I'm not going to make fun of people who do, though; I have wayyy too many posts here tagged 'bridge' for me to go around casting that particular stone.

Eastern Shore of Virginia NWR

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Here's a slideshow from the Eastern Shore of Virginia National Wildlife Refuge, near the southern tip of the Eastern Shore. I stopped here on my way from Norfolk, VA up to Wallops Island back in September. I'd taken a redeye flight from Portland, with an early morning layover in Charlotte, and I was a bit out of sorts. (Protip: Don't assume US Airways will give you a pillow and blanket just because JetBlue had them on your last redeye flight.) I'd stopped for breakfast at the little restaurant on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel (yes, on), but I decided I needed to stop and walk around a bit, so I turned at the wildlife refuge sign and had a look around.

It's primarily a migratory bird refuge, but early September isn't prime bird watching season (as far as I know), so most of my photos are of butterflies and a nearby abandoned artillery battery. The visitor center had a small butterfly garden behind the main building, and most of the photos come from there, but it seemed like there were butterflies everywhere, to a rather surreal degree. I noticed the butterflies all along the Eastern Shore, so I can't blame this entirely on jet lag. Maybe what I picked up on is actually the Northwest's relative lack of butterflies. I'm not sure, and the Questions & Answers page from the North American Butterfly Association is vague about what regions have larger or smaller butterfly populations. The Coastal Virginia Wildlife Observatory has been doing butterfly research here for several years, and several TripAdvisor reviews of the refuge mention the butterflies, so it's probably not just my imagination.

There are also a couple of photos of an enormous "cicada killer" wasp that was bumbling around on the visitor center lawn. I'd never seen one before, or any sort of bee this large for that matter. As a West Coast resident, I didn't realize the USA had bees this size. I figured (correctly, as it turns out) that I would've heard of these creatures before if they were as dangerous as they looked, so I stopped for some close up photos. A refuge volunteer wandered by to see what I was doing & was amused that I was so fascinated by a mere cicada killer. Every time an East Coast person says something like this, I always want to respond with "Oh yeah? We have wolves." Which is true, though I've never actually seen one in the wild.

The coastal battery in a few of the photos is Battery Winslow, part of the former Fort Custis. During World War II, it (along with Fort Story in Virginia Beach), defended the entrance to Chesapeake Bay from shipborne evildoers. This involved several concrete batteries sporting huge cannons, pointed seaward and able to put very large holes in anything that strayed too close to Hampton Roads. This is more or less the same role Fort Stevens played at the mouth of the Columbia River here in Oregon. Fort Custis morphed into an air force installation shortly after WWII, and was finally deactivated in 1980. The US Fish and Wildlife Service took it over a few years after that.

I'm not a military history fan by any means, but abandoned military bases can be a good source of mysterious concrete structures, slowly being reclaimed by nature. That tends to be photogenic, so I'm willing make a detour to see something like this. I"m not sure a warm sunny day was the right time to visit, though. The battery seems to call for a cold, gloomy, blustery day, and black and white photos, and maybe some angsty musicians or runway models posing unhappily in front of it. Maybe as an album cover, with an equally gloomy vinyl LP inside.

Wallops Island National Wildlife Refuge

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A few photos from Wallops Island National Wildlife Refuge across the road from part of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. Since the USFWS website is shuttered right now due to a silly government shutdown, here's their description of the place pulled from Google's cached version, since I have no idea when the official site might come back online:

The Wallops Island National Wildlife Refuge was created on July 10, 1975 when 373 acres of land were transferred to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The refuge, comprised mainly of salt marsh and woodlands, is located east of Wattsville in Accomack County, Virginia and contains habitat for a variety of trust species, including upland- and wetland-dependent migratory birds. Additionally, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has an agreement with NASA to use the NASA-owned portion of Wallops Island proper on a non-interference basis for research and management of declining wildlife in special need of protection. The agreement with NASA covers approximately 3,000 acres of Wallops Island proper and is primarily salt marsh. Wallops Island NWR and the agreement with NASA are administered by the staff at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge.

A sea-level fen, known as the Simoneston Bay sea-level fen, exist on and is protected by the refuge. Sea-level fens are nutrient-poor, maritime seepage wetlands, confined to a few sites with an unusual combination of environmental conditions for the mid-Atlantic. The fen is located just above the highest tide levels, at the base of a slope where abundant groundwater discharges. Only four occurrences are known in Virginia.

The Wallops Island NWR was opened for the first time ever to public hunting in 2002 to reduce the affects of overbrowsing by deer on refuge habitats and reduce the potential of deer collision with vehicles on the adjacent state highway 175 and neighboring flight facility.

The origin as excess, unused NASA land is similar to how the Merritt Island NWR at Cape Canaveral came about. I'm not sure coastal development pressures are quite as acute here as they are in Florida, but from the NASA standpoint it's great to have a buffer area between your launch pads and encroaching hotels and condos and so forth. The launch pads aren't protected from encroaching nature, though, as an unlucky local frog discovered during the LADEE launch.

As the USFWS description explains, this refuge is administered by the nearby Chincoteague wildlife refuge, and it doesn't have its own visitor's center or really anything in the way of developed facilities. There's just a grassy parking area and a small sign with the name of the place and some hunting and fishing regulations, and an unmarked trailhead leading off into the forest.

I stopped here on the day of the LADEE launch, as there weren't a lot of public activities that day and I had some time to kill. It basically looks like a typical coastal forest and wetland area. It probably wouldn't merit a blog post of its own if I lived in the area and saw scenery like this all the time. Still, if this isn't the sort of environment you see every day, and you're in the area anyway, it's a representative example if you want to have a quick look. Just remember to bring bug spray. I'd just purchased a new can of DEET spray but somehow forgot to put any on before wandering into the wildlife refuge, and I ended up with a few annoying bug bites. As an erstwhile South Carolina resident who really ought to know better, I found this kind of embarrassing.

Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge

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Another Florida slideshow, this time from the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, which borders and sort of overlaps the undeveloped parts of Kennedy Space Center. The tourist-friendly parts of the area ended up in the Canaveral National Seashore next door, so the wildlife refuge is mostly salt marshes and palmetto thickets, with no shortage of alligators, and mosquitoes beyond measure. I wasn't feeling much like a wilderness adventure that day, so these photos were all taken along the nature walk at the refuge's visitor center. Yeah, yeah, I know. Go ahead and make fun of me if you want.

One photo I want to point out is the taxidermied bird in a glass case. This is a Dusky Seaside Sparrow, which lived only in the Merritt Island area and went extinct in the late 1980s due to DDT and habitat loss. The bird on display looks outraged, and I can't say I blame it.

Pronghorn at Hart Mountain

There's more to Hart Mountain than the scenery. The area's a national wildlife refuge, and the odd creature you see here is the refuge's main event.

The pronghorn is a unique and rather fascinating animal. It's not really an antelope, and isn't a deer, in fact it doesn't have any close relatives at all. It looks a lot like something you'd in the African savanna, racing along with a cheetah hot on its tail, a Discovery Channel camera crew filming it all and dreaming of carnage.

It's not that much of a stretch actually. Until the end of the last ice age, around the time humans arrived in North America, there used to be a cheetah-like big cat on this continent, and (as the theory goes) it was the pronghorn's main predator. No modern biologist has actually seen that in action, of course, but it seems like a reasonable guess given the available evidence. There's no other obvious reason a pronghorn would need to run as fast as it does.

There's a school of thought that argues for trying to restore parts of the North American ecosystem to their pre-settlement state, introducing replacement species from elsewhere as needed if the North American equivalent is now extinct. So, for example, African cheetahs could replace our extinct quasi-cheetahs, so the pronghorn would finally have something to run away from. This is known as "Pleistocene rewilding". A couple of articles in favor (both by the same author) at Slate and Nature, and the inevitable Slashdot story. And the equally inevitable freakout from the righty wingnut-o-sphere. They pretty much blow a gasket over any mention of touchy subjects like "science" or "nature". Sad. Amusing, but sad.

I'm not sure how I feel about the larger proposal, bringing in lions, elephants, camels and more. But cheetahs might be worth a try, at least on an experimental, controlled basis, within a limited range. You wouldn't need all that many cheetahs, and they'd have radio collars, of course, and the usual provisions would be in place if they go after livestock, and all that. If it doesn't work out, so be it, but for my part I think it's at least worth the attempt.



It's fortunate that "pronghorn", like "antelope", is singular as well as plural, since this is the only one I saw. I understand they're actually pretty common across the West, but not in Portland obviously, so I'd never seen a live one before.

So probably someone will show up here from eastern Oregon, or northern Nevada, or Wyoming or somewhere, going, "You saw just one, and it wasn't even running, and you took pictures and posted them on the series of intarwebs!?" To which I can only answer, well, yes, that's pretty much exactly what I did. If you ain't much impressed by that, well, I'm sorry, at least reading this post didn't cost you anything.



Make fun of digital zoom if you like -- and generally you'd be right to -- but that's the only way I got these pics. So two cheers for digital zoom.

The pronghorn ran off shortly after I took the pics. I wish I'd gotten a video clip of it running, but sadly, no such luck.

Hart Mountain

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Some photos from Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge and the adjacent Warner Wetlands [map], in SE Oregon roughly an hour's drive out of Lakeview. I took these during that mini-roadtrip back in June, and it's taken until now to sort through all the photos and pick out a semi-reasonable number to post. The area's just wayyy too beautiful.

I mentioned Hart Mountain a little in my DeGarmo Canyon post a while back. What you're seeing here is the larger setting the canyon's part of.

I also have a few wildlife photos I haven't posted yet, including some of the refuge's namesake "antelope". Don't get too excited, the pics really aren't that fabulous. I don't own a super-expensive DSLR camera with a monster telephoto lens, which I suppose is what you need if you want high quality results. But still, said photos are mine, so they'll probably show up here before too long.

Haystack Rock, Pacific City

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A few photos of Haystack Rock, at Pacific City on the Oregon Coast. While we were out there a couple of weekends ago, it was gently suggested to me that I might be taking a few too many photos of the thing. But, well, if you're at the beach in Pacific City, you can basically either take photos of the ocean with the rock, or the ocean without the rock, and without it the photos could be from anywhere, really.

This is basically as close as you can get to the rock, since all offshore rocks on the coast are part of the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, nearly all are federally designated wilderness, and people are forbidden to set foot there. Boats have to stay 500 feet away, aircraft have to stay above 2000 feet elevation in the area. All of this is great, of course, since people and threatened seabirds tend not to mix all that well.

Besides, the rock looks dangerous. Since I'm not a big fan of danger, I wouldn't climb on the thing even if it was legal.

If you want to see the rock from the top or the other side, there are a couple of photos here

Just south of town is the Nestucca Bay wildlife refuge, a chunk of protected estuary that protects a variety of migratory geese. You can't go there either right now, although they're planning to add visitor facilities sooner or later.

I mention this because an article in Pacific City's local paper indicated the Nestucca Bay sanctuary was created to divert the migrating geese from the rock. Seems they used to make foraging raids on the rock under cover of night, which I expect was a rather strange sight.

I was momentarily excited to learn Haystack Rock has puffins. Then I realized it was the other Haystack Rock, up in Cannon Beach. It's better known, but smaller.

When the light's right you can see birds swirling around the rock, but they're just unidentifiable specks in the distance. But that's ok, if they aren't seagulls, and aren't puffins, I wouldn't be able to identify them anyway.

Here's a photo with a couple of surfers. Ok, would-be surfers. They wandered around in and near the water for hours on end, but I never saw anyone surfing for real.