Mark Frazier Sunrise Garden

Tomorrow is the first day of school for Gabby, and Georgia said that we should go do something, anything. A neighbor suggested a small park up in North Beach where they had Koi ponds, flowers and some sculptures. 

The park is called  the Mark Frazier Sunrise Garden, at Bayview and 3d street. It's a nice little park, with a couple of Koi ponds connected by little streams, and the advertised flowers and sculpture. A few pictures. It's right across the street from the boardwalk, and would, indeed, have an excellent view of the sun rising over Chesapeake Bay.

Mark Frazier was a former county commissioner and Mayor of North Beach

A bronze GBH

After visiting with the fish, the flowers, the butterflies, the sculptures, and a friendly local dogs, we found a Mexican restaurant and had lunch.

A driftwood lion. 

A stainless steel Ecphora.

A most uncomfortable chair. 

Swamp Mallow.

The driftwood mermaid is less convincing than the lion.

An Eastern Tiger Swallowtail on the Pickerel weed in the Koi pond.

Bye, Skye

There comes a day every dog owner dreads, the day you have to say goodbye. It's no secret that Skye had been struggling a bit for the last several months. We think that she had a fall down stairs, and hurt something a few months ago. We had her to the vet, who couldn't find anything particular wrong besides pain and weakness in her rear legs. She prescribed some pain meds, and rest, and that helped enough that in a few weeks she was back to climbing stairs to get into the house, and taking walks on the beach with us, but it was pretty clear we were on a declining slope. 

Wednesday, I walked her on the beach, in the rain. It was a very high tide so we couldn't go too far, and she made the round trip, but not too excitedly. Thursday, the day I fished, Georgia reported she climbed the basement stairs, and basically collapsed on the kitchen floor, ate and drank a little, and headed back out to her favorite bed, a heap of leaves and cedar chips in the back. She had no interest in a nighttime walk. Yesterday, Friday, she barely stirred from the bed, and when I tried to get her up for beach walk, she refused. She did not eat, or drink, apparently all day. I gave her a pain pill in the evening. This morning, she had barely stirred, and  occasionally howled in apparent pain. I gave her another pain pill, and when that didn't have any effect, we made the arrangements at our local vet. We arrived at 11, said our goodbyes, petting her as she lay on the floor. It was quick and painless and we cried.

Skye was our third dog, and our second and a half husky. The first dog, of our children's youth was Sybil, half German Shepherd and half Siberian, by reports. We liked the husky side of her traits, except for the shedding, and our second adopted dog, after the kids were grown, was a full blooded Siberian, also named Skye, one blue eye, and one brown eye, and 20 lbs lighter than Skye II. She was the rare husky you could let off the leash at the beach. She suffered some kind of stroke or heart attack at the age of 14, while we were on a trip to California. It was not a shock as she had suffered some previous similar attacks. 

This Skye, or Skye II as we sometimes called her, was adopted on Halloween Day in 2015. She had been turned in to the local pound with a brother. A local rescue group took her out, but the brother was gone when they arrived. A friend told us about her, and when we came to see her, after finding out that we had a husky previously, they basically handed us the leash.

Skye was a good dog, not a great dog. She was strong and strong willed, and had a full measure of the worst Siberian traits. She pulled on the leash, up until the last week. She was famously an escape artist, digging holes under the back yard fence, until we buried 2 X 8s along the bottom and anchored them to the bottom. She would find a crack in a door, and be gone in a flash, a trick she once pulled at our sons house in Canonsburg PA. She also pulled the leash apart at the snap more than once. She was never gone long, not because she ever came home on her own, but because we had our phone numbers on her collar, and she went to visit the first willing person she could find. And she shed, a lot. There might have been some month that she didn't shed, but it wasn't a long period. She was definitely an outdoor dog, and needed a lot of exercise, and was willing to demand it. We needed the exercise so it was a good trade.

But on the good side, she was the world's friendliest dog. She assumed all people wanted to pet her, and all other dogs wanted to play (on her somewhat rambunctious terms), and she was often right. While we looked for fossils, she looked for people to give her pets, and other dogs to pester. She was well known on the Calvert Facebook fossil page, and people often identified us by her.  There was never any quit in her, up until the last week.

In the last year or so, she changed a bit. She was clearly mostly deaf, hearing only loud bangs, which tended to startle her. She gave up sleeping on our bed, and took up sleeping in the back yard, in a spot that turned into a mud pit in the rain. She didn't care, water didn't penetrate her fur, and there in no weather cold enough in slower Maryland to seriously challenge her. We wrote it off to advancing age, and a touch of senility.

If there's any truth to the rainbow bridge stuff, I expect Skye will check in now and then for a pet (and a treat), and then be off to the next adventure. 

It's the Little Things

We had a chore to do in PF today, so we packed Skye up in the Lead Sled and took her to the dog park to get some of her ya-ya's out. Unfortunately, no other dogs came to visit while we were there, so she had to be content with running around on her own, which doesn't work as well. But she had fun sniffing the weeds.

The weed du jour, Oxalis, which gave it's name to oxalic acid.

Oxalis /ˈɒksəlᵻs/ is a large genus of flowering plants in the wood-sorrel family Oxalidaceae comprising about 800 of the 900 known species in the family. The genus occurs throughout most of the world, except for the polar areas; species diversity is particularly rich in tropical Brazil, Mexico and South Africa.

Many of the species are known as wood sorrels (sometimes written "woodsorrels" or "wood-sorrels") as they have an acidic taste reminiscent of the unrelated sorrel proper (Rumex acetosa). Some species are called yellow sorrels or pink sorrels after the color of their flowers instead. Other species are colloquially known as false shamrocks, and some called sourgrasses. For the genus as a whole, the term oxalises is also used.

There were a few butterflies around, but none were cooperative except this Eastern-Tailed Blue, a male from the powder blue on the upper surface of the wings.

Then I saw a few feet away, four more of them "puddling" on an old dog poop. I was so impressed I didn't even clean it up.

I also found this orange skipper, which seems to be a run-of-the-mill Sachem.

Apparently, the dog park wasn't near enough exercise for Skye, as she started nagging for another walk shortly after lunch. So off we went. The beach was all but empty, the fossil hunting poor (4 teeth), but the weather was nice, mid 70s and breezy from the south.

Most of the interest was on the walk home. A dash of color in the wetland?

A Blue Flag Iris, the native swamp iris. I took the starts for the blue flags in my pond from this very spot about 20 years ago.

A brush bunny on the side of the road got Skye excited. It let us get within 2 leash lengths before it got sufficiently concerned to hop off into the bushes.

A Yellow Flag Iris, a non-native swamp iris, slightly larger and more robust than the Blue Flags, in the ditch/stream at the bottom of our back lots. Considered invasive, I don't see enough of them to be worried about them taking over.

Dog Park and Battle Creek

Mid-January, and 69 F outside. After some chores and phone calls we decided to take Skye to the dog park  after lunch. When we got there, we found that many other people's dogs had the same idea, and there were lots of dogs to meet and butts to sniff.

Look Ma! This one has more hair than me! And drool too!

After a while at the dog park, we walked across the road to Biscoe Gray Heritage Farm to check it out. A relatively new park in our county it offers walking trails in the woods . . .

. . . and across farmed meadows. There's areas set aside for hunting and horseback riding (bring your own horse).

The trail leads own to historical Battle Creek, a tidal creek off the Patuxent River at this point. Upstream, not far away, the creek narrows to a small freshwater creek through one of the northernmost Bald Cypress swamps in the US.

There's a trail of Bluebird boxes around the meadows, and this one had a particularly fetching growth of lichen

More Dog Park Butterflies

Butterflies from two recent trips to the dog park. On the left, the epitome of common beauty, a Cabbage White, the weed of butterflies, on a Dandelion.

A little bitty Eastern Tailed Blue (the first of the year) on a Clover flower.

The first Horace's Duskywing of the year. Kind of a rough picture.

A couple of Great Spangled Fritillaries. I didn't see any attempt at sex.

 Another view, showing the spangles.

An Eastern Tiger Swallowtail stopped to puddle in the dirt under Skye's favorite shade tree. She almost ate him.

An American Lady (as opposed to the nearly identical Painted Lady). It's the first I've been able to clearly identify this year. Not strictly at the dog park, I spotted it when we stopped at Chesapeake Bounty on the way home.

DMV and the Dog Park

A Paulownia (Empress Tree) in full bloom

We took on a chore today that we had been putting off way too long, registering the trailer for the boat we bought last winter. The problem was the boat and trailer had never been registered in Maryland, and had never been required to be titled in Florida. But armed with a little knowledge and an iPad to look up random facts (length and weight, for example), we went over to the Loveville DMV, and managed to make our way past the bureaucracy and get it made legal.

On the way back, we stopped in at the Grays Road Dog Park. The weather has been gray and wet recently, and today was no exception. Not the most photogenic day, but I chased a couple of butterflies down while Skye. On the right is a female Spicebush Swallowtail who was visiting the abundant Dandelions.

A shot that shows the classic comet shaped mark on the underside which is the easiest field mark of the Spicebush butterfly

In the absence of other dogs, Skye ran around a little, enough to work up a decent pant, and then laid down in the grass.

A Common Buckeye took an opportunity to suck some moisture out of the damp ground, and was surprisingly patient while I took photos.

Dog Park Butterflies

As I have mentioned before here, "butterfly season" seems to be getting off to an early start this year, with warm weather bringing them out in early March. Here are three I found at the dog park in the last week, wandering around with a camera. The big yellow Easter Tiger Swallowtails are everywhere already. I spotted a Spicebush Swallowtail today in the neighborhood, the first this year, but no photo.

A little one that I see in the back yard high in the trees, but find it hard to photograph, Henry's Elfin. They usually stay in the trees, but maybe this one was trying to puddle in the moist sand. These a short termer, having one flight in spring, and disappearing for summer and fall. They're about as big as a medium sized fingernail.

Another short term resident, the Falcated Orangetip, named for the uhh, falcated (hooked) orange tip? These too have a single flight in spring, and disappear for the rest of the year. It's hard to see the orange tip in flight, and only the males have it; the females are just white on top, but they both have olive green mottling on the underside. From a distance, they're easily confused with the dime a dozen Cabbage Whites or the white form of the Clouded Sulphur. They're a bit smaller, and fly a little different, but it's kind of a hard call.