Today I wandered thru the muck of Spring Valley Wildlife Area. At a bit under 1000 acres there's just enough room(if your wearing hipboots)to get yourself lost amid cypress trees and beaver ponds. Though on most days you can walk the main trail around the marsh and have it completely to yourself. Every step seems to pull at you, the black ooze a primordial soup bubbling with life. You come out smelling somehow of muskrats and bullfrogs, beavers and snakes. It's impossible to come out of the swamp anything like clean but if your quiet and try to insinuate yourself into the swamp instead of crash thru it like your running from knife wielding mutants in a B-movie you will soon realise the place is crawling with life. Just be sure to use enough bugspray to mutate your own DNA or you will find you are crawling with life too.
Dragonflies which almost never pose for pictures were especially cooperative today and I found myself taking way too many pictures of them. But at least this slowed me down enough that I realised the beaver pond I was slipping along was hosting a bit of drama as two muskrats were courting in a bit of brush in the middle of the pond.
I stood leaning against a red maple for an hour as the two groomed each other and swam around and around each other, each time retreating to the privacy of their brushpile. Luckily all this standing around let the rest of the swamp come alive and soon a small diving duck surfaced in front of me with a tadpole.
Soon other muskrats went about their business ignoring the pair in the brushpile.
Spring Valley is home to an amazing amount of bird life and over 230 different species of birds have been seen here, thats more on this 1000 acres of swamp and river bottom than the entirety of many western states.
I finally emerged back into the heat and bright sun of the parking lot, blinking and feeling somehow like I'd returned from another world.
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